Australian skipper Meg Lanning stated that they deserved to win the final of the ICC Women World Cup 2022 against arch-rivals England at the Hagley Oval, Christchurch on Sunday. This is Australia’s seventh World Cup title as they won convincingly by 71 runs to create history and also remained unbeaten throughout the tournament.
Australia posted an above-par score of 356 runs after Alyssa Healy scored a piece de resistance knock of 170 runs. Healy added 160 runs with her opening partner Rachael Haynes and then added another big alliance of 156 runs with Beth Mooney for the second wicket.
Meanwhile, Alana King and Jess Jonassen scalped three wickets apiece for Australia while Megan Schutt took two wickets for the Meg Lanning-led team.
Australia was just too good in the end for England and continued their dominating in Women’s Cricket. Meg Lanning was delighted after her team’s performance throughout the tournament as they remained unbeaten.
Meg Lanning said in the post-match presentation, “We have been extremely consistent over a long period of time, and to come out and perform so well throughout the tournament, I think we deserve the win tonight. We knew we had to have a number of people contributing which we had throughout the tournament, we had some young players come in and make an impact straight away which is great for the team and great for the more experienced players to keep pushing them to get better. Off the field, we had great support from the coaching staff and support staff to get us to this point. It was incredible (Alyssa Healy’s knock), to do it in a World Cup final. Some of those shots she was playing were ridiculous and I think she set the base really nicely it is something we have spoken about a lot as a batting group, being patient upfront and building the platform to explode at the backend and that is what happened today.
On the other hand, Natalie Sciver was the lone warrior for England as she scored an unbeaten knock of 148 runs in the run-chase. However, the all-rounder could not get support from the other end.
She added, “Nat Sciver is an incredible player and played a really special inning, on any other day it would potentially be a match-winning one. We knew England would come hard at us and we expected a contest and we certainly got that. There’s some good depth in our squad. We have seen Alana King and Darcie Brown come in and dominate and lift the team, so it is important not to rely on one or two players. We will celebrate this one first, important to make sure to look back at this period and see how successful it’s been because there’s been a lot of hard work that has gone into it, and hasn’t been easy. There’s been ups and downs through the whole thing, nice to be able to get to the end of this nice little block and be able to say we are World Cup champions. Thank you to Heather and England for the contest today, thanks to everyone at the ICC, New Zealand Cricket for getting this tournament up, it’s been an incredible effort, with lots of work going on behind the scenes. I want to thank our coaches and support staff who put so much time and effort behind the scenes to get us up and about to be able to play cricket. Well done to the team and we will certainly enjoy this one.”
Australia was a force to reckon with in the quadrennial tournament as they ticked the right boxes throughout the competition. There is no doubt that they are currently the best Women’s team in the world and they proved their mettle in the ODI showpiece.
