'Disappointed' Gardner would go again for Australia captaincy

Ashleigh Gardner has admitted her disappointment at missing out on the Australia captaincy but would go for the role again if she was viewed as a potential candidate in the future.

Gardner, a key allrounder across all formats, was considered the frontrunner for the job after Alyssa Healy announced her retirement last month, but Sophie Molineux was the surprise choice. Gardner will instead be a joint-vice-captain alongside Tahlia McGrath - who has led Australia on 15 occasions - so is still just one step away from taking charge of her country for the first time, although the hierarchy between the pair has yet to be established with McGrath's form having been under scrutiny in recent times.

"You kind of have this defence mechanism where if you don't get it you don't want to be so disappointed that you can't move on," Gardner told ESPNcricinfo ahead of the India series. "So, for me, it was like making sure that if I got it, amazing. If I didn't, that's okay. Obviously when I got the news that I didn't get it, there was certainly disappointment there of course.

"It's because I care and I care about this team and you kind of get caught up in 'how can I influence this team in Ashleigh's way'. But then to find out that Soph got it, I was just so excited for her. She's an amazing person and I think the influence that I've seen from afar that she's had on groups, everyone speaks so highly of her, which is a credit to her as a person but then also the way that she leads and she's a very deep thinker of the game."

For Gardner, who is the current captain of Sydney Sixers and led Gujarat Giants in the WPL, missing out on the Australia role has not dulled her leadership ambitions. At 28, there is still time on her side, although the likes of Annabel Sutherland and Phoebe Litchfield would likely be future contenders as well.

"If they ever saw me to be in that position, absolutely," she said on having another go for the job. "I love playing in this team. I love the people within this group. I think for me it's making sure that I've got the outlook of: if there's a 'C' next to your name, great. But you can still lead in a lot of other ways and I guess that's something that I've tried to do probably the last couple of years; if I'm passionate about something and I want to be a real driver for change, still doing it, even if you're in an official role or not. So, if that opportunity ever came up, great."

The finer details of how the joint-vice-captaincy set-up will work, and the potential for Molineux to have her workload managed at times given her injury history, are still being worked through with the Australia squad having only come back together in the last 48 hours for the first time since their semi-final exit at the ODI World Cup where India chased down 339.

There was a swift turnaround after that tournament into the WBBL season, and then a number of Australia players have been at the WPL with others playing WNCL ahead of the India multi-format series.

"It's probably actually a discussion that we need to have," Gardner said of the new leadership group. "The other two were in Australia when they got the news, I was on a golf course in India. So it was almost like taking that news for what it was and then being able to one, get the feedback on areas that I can improve on first and foremost, and then how can I support Soph and T-Mac in whatever that is.

"It's probably just those ongoing conversations that you need to keep having to best utilise all of us. We're all very different people and I think we've got different strengths. It's being able to support Soph in whatever that is and then ultimately whatever happens with T-Mac and I, it's being able to just be really diligent and just be transparent with whatever that looks like in terms of the leadership group and then just where we see the team going as well."

The loss to India in the ODI World Cup semi-final means that for first time since 2017, Australia's ICC trophy cabinet is empty. In both the ODI and T20 World Cups, the semi-final losses came after unbeaten group stages with uncharacteristic lapses from a team that for so long had been ruthless.

"I still think there's a great opportunity to understand what went wrong and those moments we're not winning," Gardner said. "You play a bilateral series, you work out a pretty good process to overcome the challenges. In a World Cup you play [a team] once or twice.

"So for us it's probably just trying to understand where we lost the game and what are ways that we can try and improve, whether that's the mindset or whether that's under pressure and we're not handling that as well as what we could have.

"I think looking at the World Cup as a whole, we pulled ourselves out of a couple of holes. The game against Pakistan we were 7 for 70 [76] and Beth Mooney played an amazing innings.

"There were so many aspects of that whole World Cup where our backs were up against the wall and we found a way. India had our backs right up against the wall in that semi-final and we couldn't find a way. So it's probably looking at the whole World Cup rather than just the semi-final. Of course, that's the game we lost when it really mattered. I guess across the last 18 months we've lost about two games of cricket and they've both been ones that matter."