Alyssa Healy

The Healy name continues to live strongly in the Australian game. After a rocky start to international cricket, Alyssa Healy has transformed herself into one of the most destructive batters in the world. She is arguably the finest player of the lofted on-drive in the game and can take down bowling attacks in the blink of an eye. In October 2019 she set a new record for the highest T20I innings with an unbeaten 148 off 61 balls against Sri Lanka and in 2020 played the defining innings of the T20 World Cup final in Melbourne.

However, it took some time to reach those levels. In the first 80 matches of her T20I career she averaged 17.44 with a strike-rate of 112; in the first 52 matches of her ODI career she had an average of 15.96. Then, as with many in the same era of the Australian team, the semi-final exit in the 2017 ODI World Cup proved pivotal. She permanently moved to opening the innings, a position she had occasionally filled previously and given glimpse of her potential - an unbeaten 62 in an ODI against New Zealand in 2012 and 90 off 61 balls in a T20I against India the same year - and from that point her T20I average hit 36 with a strike-rate of 149, since 2017 in ODIs she has averaged 55.

Having been a key part of the 2018 T20 World Cup triumph in West Indies, her strength of character was on display at the start of the massively-hyped 2020 edition on home soil when she entered on a string of five single-figure scores then struck a half-century in the opening match, albeit a defeat, before saving her best of the grandest occasion of all in front of 86,000 people.

Her glovework has become increasingly slick; some of her work stood up to the likes of Megan Schutt can be outstanding - not least the catch to remove Shafali Verma in the 2020 World Cup final.