Australia star Ellyse Perry scripts memorable Mumbai homecoming ahead of 2023 World Cup, WIPL

Ellyse Perry, Australia’s feted allrounder. (Image source: Twitter/@EllysePerry)

The first-ever Women’s T20 Challenge fixture is just a couple of hours away, at the Wankhede Stadium. Ellyse Perry, Australia’s feted allrounder, is the first to take the field. Measuring tape in hand, she is out gauging her run-up on the sultry late-May Mumbai afternoon even before any other player reaches the dugouts.

It is 2018, and Perry is among the five Australians, and 10 overseas recruits overall, in town, gearing up to participate in a one-off match that would go on to be a prelude to an inaugural Women’s Indian Premier League (WIPL), belatedly penciled in for March 2023.

Perry, now 27, is bonafide cricketing royalty at this juncture of her career, her icon status beyond doubt or debate. Only seven months earlier, she had soared into rarified air with her maiden international ton, an Australian record of 213 not-out in Test cricket, which further embossed her giant footprints on the game that have only grown since she first appeared in green and gold, as a 17-year-old.

Australia Women 2020 World Cup team. (Image source: Twitter/@EllysePerry)

The T20 Challenge fixture, set up as a double-header with the men's IPL Qualifier 1, is an exhibition of the world’s best talent in women’s cricket. And all it takes is just three balls for Perry to dismiss one of India’s best. The wicket of Trailblazers opener Smriti Mandhana in her bag, Perry goes on to take a spectacular low, diving catch to dismiss No. 5 Jemimah Rodrigues before she bowls New Zealand captain, Suzie Bates, to finish with a decisive 3-0-20-2 for eventual champions Supernovas.

The turnout at the Wankhede is sparse. But they applaud what they’ve seen of an all-time great in a watershed match for the women’s game. “Perryyyy, Perryyyy” cheers emerge from several pockets of the stands, occupied by young girls and boys alike.
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December 11, 2022. It’s been over four years since that May afternoon, four years since Perry and Australia last toured India. The home team, victors in a Super-Over finish for the ages, pulled level with the visitors 1-1 in a five-T20I series. Australia’s unbeaten yearlong streak in 2022 has just come to an end. The record 47,000-strong crowd at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai has emptied.

It’s 11pm, and Perry is bowling at nearly full tilt on one of the practice pitches under the watch of a backroom staff member. In her only over on the night, bowled in the powerplay in regulation time, she had conceded 16. The seven-ball sequence had almost everything a bowler would hope it didn’t: a wide ball that fetched the opposition five toil-less runs, two back-to-back boundaries, and a dropped catch.

Bowling has been Perry’s calling card on this tour so far, one where she made the starting XI for the first time this year in T20Is. (Thanks, in no small part, to designated captain Meg Lanning’s leave of absence and former vice-captain Rachael Haynes’ retirement, which made Perry a shoo-in in the squad.) Until this assignment, she had warmed the bench in the multi-format Ashes, the Ireland tri-series and the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, as Australia, under Lanning, opted for hitters with higher strike rates.

Thanks to unbeaten, second-wicket century stands between Beth Mooney and Tahlia McGrath, though, Australia haven’t needed Perry to bat in the first two matches. With the ball, she was peerless in the Australian attack in game one, taking a superb 2-1-10-2 as first change, courtesy her accuracy and pace.

But the 16-run over in the second T20I has, clearly, left a scar, in a contest of fine margins often going down to the last ball of the one-over eliminator. Ever the diligent toiler, her commitment to ironing out creases in her craft at this late hour hardly strikes as odd.
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December 14, 2022. The India vs Australia caravan has moved to the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai for the third T20I. India’s pace-bowling duo Renuka Singh and Anjali Sarvani have removed Alyssa Healy and Mooney inside two overs after India opted to field for a second straight game.

The track here is nothing like the “batting paradise”, as Perry would put it later, the DY Patil Stadium surface was. The emergence of Women’s Big Bash League-hardened younger, more aggressive hitters has led to questions over her utility in the national T20I mix this past year.

That she hasn’t batted in T20Is since October 2021 marks the air with anticipation ahead of her arrival to the crease. But much of it matters little at this point; the circumstances require her to offset some of the pressure that a scorecard reading 5 for 2 has built up.

The venue is familiar to Perry, one that gave her a “really fun memory” nine years ago. During the 2013 ODI World Cup final, she bowled Australia to the title, with an injured ankle, at this ground.

It’s a different format, a different era now. “Not really comparative,” Perry says, “to where we are.” She walks in at No. 4. Chants of her name from the North Stand of the Brabourne Stadium ring aloud. The 10,000-odd crowd does enough to make clear the most celebrated name on the Australian score sheet on the night is widely popular in cricket country, India, too.

Perry gets down to business in quick time. She cracks a four, off Sarvani's third ball. It is the first of her 12 boundaries on a night she would post her highest score in her T20I career of 77 innings: 75, off just 47 balls.

The urgency to keep the scoreboard ticking, to chew up as few dots as possible, is evident in her body language from the get-go. She surveys the field, almost every alternate ball, to suss out her boundary-scoring options.

The result: a strike rate of 159.57. In any T20I innings where she made more than 12 runs since her debut in 2009, her scoring rate hadn’t been higher than what she achieved on Wednesday night.

For a batter under immense scrutiny over this one facet of her game in the recent past, in a format with little room for slack, the intent and outcome pleased Perry and Australia as much as it regaled the spectators in attendance.

At the heart of one of the career-best knocks of a decorated achiever whose year began with exclusion from the T20Is during the Ashes, was another ‘E’ word: Evolution.

"I think you're always trying to evolve and the game is moving at such a rapid pace forward, we've seen that around the world," Perry would say after the match. "Very fortunately for us, we've got the WBBL which has been going now for eight editions and I think there's no better place to keep evolving and trying to develop.

"That's a really strong motivating factor for me to still play, because that's the most fun part of the game, continuing to work on things and work with people that you love working with."

Later, handed the ball in the 11th over of Australia’s successful defence of 172, Perry, deployed as the seventh and last bowling option in the third T20I, almost had Shafali Verma, her former Sydney Sixers team-mate and India’s big-hitting teen phenom, chop on. Verma escaped unscathed; Player of the Match Perry’s solitary – and wicketless – over on the night went for just two runs.

“It's just kind of different, small impact roles, at different points for me at the moment,” explained Perry, formerly an opening bowler, about the responsibility she’s been asked to shoulder with the ball.
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Australia are a win away from sealing the series. A victory for India on Saturday’s fourth T20I will force the face-off to a decider on December 20.

On evidence from the first three games, if Perry clicks in one department, it would be advantage: Australia. Regardless, the world’s premier allrounder until not so long ago has already sent a timely reminder what she might bring to a starting XI in the 2023 T20 World Cup in February.

As for the crowd expected to flock the Brabourne Stadium for the next two T20Is, exhibits of what Perry might have to offer any WIPL teams might be on show. Again.