It is said that one man’s lesson could be someone’s experience, it depends on how they relate the situation to the situation from the past.
Meg Lanning, Australia’s Women’s cricket captain was watching the fourth day of the Men’s Ashes played at Headingley. Watching Ben Stokes bat brought her back the memories of the 2017 World Cup semifinal, where a single player took away the game from them just like Ben Stokes was doing.
It was Indian big-hitter Harmanpreet Kaur who took the world No.1 Australians to cleaners, smashing an unbeaten 171 from 115 balls to win the game and take India into the final of Women’s World Cup.
Here’s what Meg Lanning had to say about both the Situation:
“Being a captain, you find yourselves in pressure situations and that game did take me back to the semi-final of the World Cup when Kaur was going off. Time went quick and we found it pretty hard to stop her and things just rolled on. We expected something to happen to get her out but it didn’t, so that game at Headingley reminded me of the things,” she added.
“It’s never easy and I look back on that and think about all these different things I could have done, but it’s hard at that moment to get everything right. So I certainly understand the pressure Tim was under and how hard it is to make the right decisions all the time. It’s hard in those situations to take a step back and slow things down but that’s something we spoke about after – maybe we could have slowed the game down,” Lanning said.
“It did seem in the Test, things were going quick and it got out of control. It’s one of those games that can either bring the whole series down or it can galvanize the group moving forward,” she further added.
“Something I learned from that was about trying to use the people around me and trying to use the senior players. It’s really hard when everything falls on one person and a different perspective is good. So taking the time to slow things down and talking to the vice-captain and your senior players and just trying to stall things a little bit to try and shift the momentum that way.” Lanning told cricket.com.au.
Lanning’s advice was simple and came from a place of experience maybe by overthinking the situation or thinking about all those various outcomes won’t change anything. It would be great if the Australian Men’s cricket team learn from the women’s cricket team mistakes, the ashes could be still brought home is what Lanning feels.
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