Ellyse Perry has been named one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Decade. Isabelle Westbury charts the Australian’s rise from being a bowler who batted to becoming the most complete cricketer of her generation.
Wisden’s decade in review series is brought to you in association with Perry, designers of distinctive club blazers made in Yorkshire since 1946. Vote in the decade in review readers’ survey.
It is not so much that Ellyse Perry was not a superstar at the turn of the decade. It’s more that, back then, she was an altogether different kind of superstar.
In 2010, Perry was arguably the only globally recognised figure in women’s cricket, her status as a dual international (in football, too) having catapulted the teenager beyond the confines of any one sport. Yet few will have seen Perry’s feats on the field. They would simply have known of her.
Today, Perry remains a superstar, but judged on different criteria. As women’s cricket has developed from a sport that was little seen and token-referenced to one in which performances are watched, analysed and scrutinised more than ever before, so Perry has evolved to become the complete cricketer.
Only we judged too soon. Perry got married, the Sixers won their next nine matches to reach the WBBL’s first final and Perry scored 732 ODI runs in 2016 (only eight other players have managed more in a calendar year, ever). A year later she became just the third women to score a Test double century, against England. Of course. Perry had adapted.
It is that ability to adapt, to learn from her (comparative) failures, which is the final touch to the Perry product. Her captaincy matured, as did her batting, and then her nature relaxed with those around her too. She is quick to attribute much of her success to two key coaches, Matthew Mott for Australia and Ben Sawyer for the Sixers, and they, in turn are quick to attribute much of theirs to her. Ego doesn’t come into it, because Perry listens, and learns.
The challenge now is to maintain that drive. Perry, after all, has done it all. What more is there to achieve, to motivate her? Maybe that is the perspective not of Perry, but of us onlookers, because her form is still improving. She ends the decade as the highest ranked all-rounder in both ODIs and T20Is and her best bowling figures — a seven-wicket demolition of England — came this summer. With Ellyse’s namesake Katy performing at next year’s T20 World Cup final, the real contest might be the tussle for the most celebrated Perry on show. Perhaps the cricketer may seek to cast her net wider in the upcoming 10 years; sports domination this decade, something more the next? Don’t count against it.
