LISA STHALEKAR: Choosing Alyssa Healy for Ashes Test match at MCG too risky for Australian team

Lisa Sthalekar
The Nightly
The Sri Lankans will be regretting their decision not to call for the DRS when the ball struck Travis Head on the pads during the first Test in Galle.

You would think after easily wrapping up the Ashes missing the final match because you are fighting injury was a no-brainer – well you have not met Alyssa Healy.

The Australian captain has said she will do what is best for the team, but she knows if she does not play at the MCG for the day-night Test on Thursday it could be the last Ashes Test she plays.

At 34 and coming to the end of a horror summer marred by injury Healy will play only her 10th Test if she suits up against the Poms.

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In comparison her husband, Mitchell Starc, is playing his 95th in Sri Lanka right now. Healy has actually played for Australia longer than Starc, having debuted 10 months before her other half, but has played only a fraction of the Test cricket he has.

Test match cricket is regarded as the truest form of the game so our elite female players want to play every one they can as they play them rarely.

The last time Australia won an Ashes home Test was in 2011 at Bankstown Oval in Western Sydney. That victory regained the Ashes that the team had lost in 2005 in England. The 2005 win was a watershed moment for the English with Australia having held the Ashes for the previous four decades.

Healy would love to lead her side to the first Ashes home Test win in more than decade, which is no doubt why she was happy to sit out the shorter form games during the series.

Healy boldly declared “she is ready to go” today, but that may be more to convince the selectors with the medical team and head coach, Shelley Nitschke, likely to make the final decision on if she plays.

It would be a huge call to include Healy, who, if selected, will only bat. She has been under an injury cloud since the T20 World Cup in October.

At that tournament it was a ruptured plantar fasciitis that kept her out, where Australia went on to lose the semifinal against South Africa.

Then during the WBBL she tore her meniscus and has since only played as a batter before the Ashes series.

Healy played wicketkeeper in the three ODIs, but now has caused a stress reaction in the same foot, which kept her out of the three T20s and had her in a moon boot

Entering her mid-30s who knows how much longer Healy will be wearing the baggy green so you can’t begrudge her for wanting to push through some pain.

She has done it before when she kept in the last Ashes Test with two broken fingers.

If Healy does play Beth Mooney would keep and drop to five in the batting line-up and Healy would open alongside Phoebe Litchfield.

However if she does not play either Georgia Voll makes her Test debut and opens with her great mate from the Sydney Thunder, Litchfield.

Annabel Sutherland might be a dark horse to open in Healy’s absence. She already has a double century and an Ashes century but has never battered higher than number six. Playing leg spinner Georgia Wareham could provide her the opportunity to open.

Healy’s has been a key cog in what Cricket Australia chair Mike Baird called the “best sporting team Australia has ever produced”.

He made the comments as he presented the Australian team the ICC Women’s Championship — a trophy that recognises their dominance in the 50-over format over two and half years.

Australia have been the only winners of this trophy, making it three consecutive titles. Add this to their seven ODI World Cups and six T20 crowns and that is domination in anyone’s book.

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