da realbet： Australia’s captain has spent the off-season working on her technique after a run of injuries
da bet sport： Andrew McGlashan31-Jul-2025Australia captain Alyssa Healy has made some technical adjustments to her wicketkeeping technique in a bid to ease the strain on her body ahead of the ODI World Cup in India and Sri Lanka.Healy has not kept in a competitive fixture since the ODI series against England during the Ashes in January. She played the Test in that series as a specialist batter having suffered a recurrence of a foot injury that she first sustained at last year’s T20 World Cup, while a knee injury curtailed her WBBL season.Healy explained that the changes won’t be hugely visible but consist of her starting in a slightly more upright position, something she termed a hybrid technique between what is generally coached differently in Australia and England.Related
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“We’ve been taught how to wicket keep a certain way in this country for an extended period of time,” Healy said at the announcement of Westpac as a new partner with Cricket Australia. “At the end of the day, it’s not overly efficient on our bodies, and doing it at 35 is not ideal.”We’ve just been looking at ways to make it a little bit easier for some ageing joints and trying to keep things moving the way they should. It’s been a nice learning experience later in my career, so hopefully it pays off.”Speaking separately to ESPNcricinfo, Healy went into more detail on how the changes came about following discussions with a podiatrist she was working with around her latest injury.”One of them actually worded it to me like when, and I’m not comparing myself to him, but when Cristiano Ronaldo started to get towards the back end of his career, they changed positions for him to make it a little bit easier on the body,” Healy said. “It was interesting and I said, well, how do we do that in the game of cricket? Like you can’t really change positions, but can we change things technically to make things more efficient? And we just played around with it.Alyssa Healy has battled injury over the past year•ICC/Getty Images
“[Looking at] some of the stressful parts of my job and what it’s doing to some of the joints in my body and how do I get the best out of myself for the back end of my career. So we just tinkered around with it and it’s just really simply, it’s kind of like a bit of a hybrid model between what the English do and what we do.”We’ve all been traditionally taught to stay low and come up with the ball and that’s fine until your knees and your feet can’t allow you to do that anymore. So just been playing around with how to get to my power position a little bit differently.”Healy will return to keeping in the upcoming Australia A series against India A with the hope she can play a full role behind the stumps at the World Cup which starts in late September. Australia will prepare for that tournament with three ODIs against India.”I’ll get a red-hot crack at it in the ODI fixtures in that A-series, so we’ll get a better look at how things are working,” she said. “My goal is to be there and playing in the World Cup as a wicketkeeper, so hopefully that pans out.”While Australia have a significant prize ahead of them as defending champions at the ODI World Cup, the team won’t be seen on home soil until the middle of February when they face India, with the WPL now permanently in January and forcing them out of the school holiday window.The multiformat series against India involves three T20Is, three ODIs and finishes with a day-night Test at the WACA in Perth.”Not having an international fixture in that school holiday period does hurt a little bit, but in saying that, it kind of extends the cricket season, which isn’t completely a bad thing for our sport,” Healy said. “At the back end of the Ashes [last year], I felt like that was really cool to have it at the end of the Border-Gavaskar, so hopefully there’s similar sort of momentum this year at the end of the men’s Ashes, that there’s still some more cricket to watch.”We’re playing India, which is one of the biggest series for us, so we’ll wait and see how it plays out. I think it’s going to look different for a little period of time until we work out the right balance for us in Australia with WPL shifting.”On the prospect of the pink-ball Test, Healy said: “Hopefully we get a nice fast, bouncy wicket, and we can show the Indians how good our pace stocks are.”
