As Australian cricket enters a phase of transition in its pace attack, Sydney Sixers quick Maitlan Brown is emerging as a strong national contender — but this time, she is determined not to let the pressure consume her.
Brown, now 28, has begun the 2025 WBBL season with exceptional clarity and rhythm. Her economy rate of 4.76 is the second-best in the league, complementing her recognition as joint player of the Spring Challenge and Australia A’s best bowler in last year’s red-ball match against India.
But after years of letting national selection dominate her thoughts, she refuses to fall back into old patterns that once left her “deteriorated”.
With pace leader Megan Schutt signaling a likely 2026 retirement, Australia’s future fast-bowling lineup is being reshaped. Brown sits among a developing group of quicks — including Georgia Prestwidge, Tess Flintoff, Hannah Darlington, Lauren Cheatle, Milly Illingworth, Lucy Hamilton and Chloe Ainsworth — but she has learned to keep her mind from drifting ahead of her cricket.
Before her current resurgence, Brown often struggled with the weight of expectation she placed on herself. Speaking about the shift in her mindset, she explained, “At the end of the day, you can’t tell the selectors what to do. I want to stay ready, because if I do get the phone call, that would be really exciting. But if I focus on it too much, then it’s really going to take away with what I’m doing.”
Brown was part of Australia’s squads in 2020 and 2021, a period during which she often felt overwhelmed by the desire to debut. That intensity became counterproductive.
She recalled how simply noticing selectors at training once derailed her focus, “I would go to Aussie camp or something, and I would see one of the selectors watching, and then I would think about, ‘Oh my gosh, like I have to be on here’.”
That pressure bled directly into her bowling, “I wouldn’t actually be focusing on bowling, and I would bowl pretty bad.” Eventually, she realized how much the fixation had cost her, “I focused on it a whole lot, and it really made me lose sight of what I was doing.”
A deeper investment in sports psychology helped her rebuild both her mindset and her confidence. Rather than trying to return to an earlier version of herself, Brown embraced a more expansive sense of what she could become.
She described the turning point, “One of the things that really hit me was not limiting myself or trying to go back to a different, past version of myself,” Brown said.
She followed that lesson with a new, liberating outlook, “And actually just going, ‘Hey, why can’t I just be the best I’ve ever been’, and actually having that as a focus.”
Brown’s WBBL journey has been one of progression and reinvention. Across 2016 to 2020, she claimed 45 wickets for the Melbourne Renegades, becoming one of the league’s spirited young quicks.
After a wicketless 2020 season in which she played only 4 matches, she made the decision to move to the Sydney Sixers — a shift that sparked a fresh phase in her career.
With the Sixers, she has picked up 31 wickets, and in the 2025 season, she has already taken 3 wickets in 3 matches, with a best of 2/18.
Maitlan Brown remains firmly in Australia’s future fast-bowling conversation. But this version of her — calmer, clearer and mentally grounded — is no longer defined by selection anxiety. Instead of chasing the national call-up, she is simply preparing for it.
(Quotes sourced from cricket.com.au)
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