Record Records - Part 7, Cricket-III: Meg Lanning
Last week we saw the most dominant individual scorer in the history of cricket and maybe all sport. This time we’re looking at the most dominant captain in the history of cricket, and again, maybe all of team sports.
Scrutinising sport is a funny thing. It’s a competition of physical prowess, mental toughness, team work, preparation, all that jazz that coaches go on about. But it’s hard to put a number on mental toughness, hard to precisely define how prepared an athlete is, hard to objectively state the team work at play. But we want to know these things! The inherent nature of competition drives the desire to quantify who is competing the best, and those really invested in the culture and fabric of a sport know that winning titles and medals doesn’t always reflect this. And so we get statistics, analytics, numbers based solely on output and production by the athletes, an imperfect but inescapable surrogate for what we really want.
This series is a celebration of those in their sports that have statistical achievements so impressive I don’t think they’re likely to ever be bettered or even repeated. This is by no means supposed to fulfil some perfect list of the most impressive records and statistics across the sporting world, these are just records that are interesting and incredible in my opinion, and are therefore of course very much centred on the sports that I love or pay attention to. This series of articles is focused on sports that I am attached to, so, apologies for inevitably missing some incredible record in a field I’m ignorant of.
For other articles in this series, so far we’ve covered:
the many records of Tom Brady
the incredible feats of Wilt Chamberlain
an intro to cricket stats and the parallel achievements of Shane Warne and Muthiah Muralidaran
and last week the insane numbers that are the records of Don Bradman
Now it’s time to explore that tantalising concept I said at the top, can we indentify the most dominant captain in the history of team sport? Well, my money is on…
Meg Lanning - International Dominance
When I think of dominance in limited overs cricket, there are two main ways that come to mind. First is scoring big, centuries are harder to come by in the time-compressed formats, and players who can score lots of them can dominate those games. Second is winning big, being able to lead your team to victory when it matters most, winning on the biggest stages of international tournaments.
Regarding the first type of dominance, the record for most limited overs centuries in men’s international cricket belongs to the legendary Virat Kohli, with an astonishing 51, and he’s still going strong. But considering his career dominance, he has comparatively little silverware to show for it, and none as captain. Regarding the second type of dominance, the men’s international cricketer with the most limited overs silverware, and especially as captain, is Ricky Ponting. He’s won 3 World Cups as a player, shares the record for captains to win 2 World Cups with Clive Lloyd and MS Dhoni, and also won 2 Champions Trophy tournaments. And his team set the record for consecutive ODI wins in 2003 with 21 (the next closest is a streak of 13!). But Ponting is only 60% of the way to Kohli’s tally of centuries. Could you even imagine the superhuman needed to dominate both categories? Scoring big in limited overs more than anyone, AND captaining their team to unprecedented success? Well, imagine no more, because we just described Meg Lanning.
Lanning holding one of her many, many, many trophies, picture taken from here
Going back to those categories, international centuries and silverware, check this out:
Most limited overs centuries (men’s cricket): Virat Kohli - 4.1% ahead of 2nd place
Most international tournament wins (men’s cricket): Ricky Ponting - 5 (with 4 as captain)
Most consecutive ODI wins as captain (men’s cricket): Ricky Ponting - 21
Now, on the other hand:
Most limited overs centuries (women’s cricket): Meg Lanning - 30.8% ahead of 2nd place
Most international tournament wins (women’s cricket): Meg Lanning - 7 (with 5 as captain)
Most consecutive ODI wins as captain (women’s cricket): Meg Lanning - 26
Damn…
But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself, jumping to impressive records in an effort to set the stage, to bait the hook with how great the individual is. So with this baited hook, let’s look at the person before obsessing over the numbers (as we will inevitably do).
Meghann Moira Lanning, was born in 1992 (amazing year) in Singapore to Australian parents who moved back to Australia not long after she entered the world. She’s the fourth child in the family and has a younger sister, Anna, who would also go on to play professional cricket, though not as history-shaking. Meg played cricket from the age of 10, representing NSW in primary school. After relocating further south to Melbourne, she was 14 when she made history by becoming the first girl to play for a first-string cricket side of the prestigious Associated Public Schools. She would go on to make quite a habit out of making history. At 18 she made her debut for Australia, playing a T20I (twenty-twenty international) and a week later an ODI (one day international). Only a week after that she notched her maiden century in another brazen act of history making, becoming the youngest Australian to score an international century, beating Ricky Ponting’s mark by more than 2 years! Get used to it Ponting, Lanning is coming for your records, though most runs by an Australian in tests is safe don’t worry.
2 years later she hit a 45 ball century to make more history, the fastest 100 ever by an Australian in Women’s cricket. This was only a few months removed from winning her first international tournament, a key squad member of the 2012 women’s T20 world cup. Despite only being 20 years old she was the 3rd highest run scorer of the tournament. A few months later she added to the trophy cabinet, winning the 2013 women’s cricket world cup (ODIs, not T20s…). Between December 2010 and February 2013 (that’s 2 years and 2 months) she had already won two international tournaments, broken the record for fastest century by an Australian woman, and smashed Ponting’s record for youngest ever Australian international centurion. Not too shabby. But the meteor had only just started to burn.
In January 2014 she was named the Australian women’s ODI captain, again making history (she can’t help herself) as the youngest international cricket captain for Australia, men or women, ever. At 21 years and 200 days she was younger by roughly a year than the previous youngest men’s and women’s captains. A month later she was also the T20 captain, and by June it was official that she was the full-time captain of the Australian women’s cricket team in all formats (T20s, ODIs, and tests). In the 2014 T20 world cup she was the tournament’s top scorer (captaincy clearly not a hindrance) as she added another trophy to her young cabinet.
A quick aside before we continue. I mentioned above that in June of 2014 she was confirmed captain of all formats, including tests, though until then I had only mentioned T20s and ODIs. That’s the thing about women’s cricket, due to the massively one-sided historical bias of organisations and financing, the women’s team haven’t had the same opportunities as the men’s. Now, this is true for almost all sports, but cricket has the interesting quirk of its differing formats. Test matches were the original, and for a long time, only form of international cricket for either sex up until the 70s. We discussed last time, when talking about Bradman, how the number of tests played per year gradually increased as touring became more feasible. Well, by the 1960s the stars of the men’s game were playing on average 5 to 10 tests per year. For example, the great West Indies allrounder, Garfield Sobers, played 91 tests across the late 50s, the 60s, and early 70s. By comparison, the Australian Women’s cricket team, in their history, have played 77 test matches. As a team! That’s between 1934 and 2023.
When the limited overs formats of the game arrived, ODIs in the 1970s and T20s in the 2000s, they provided a more readily available format for the cash strapped and under-supported women’s cricket teams. So, we have female cricketers who have played over 300 innings at an international level, with only a handful from tests. This means the priority when assessing greatness in women’s cricket lands on limited overs results (especially for players from the past 50 years), in contrast to men’s cricket where test matches have historically held more weight towards a player’s legacy. From this aside, I am trying to show why from here on my comparisons of Meg Lanning to other cricketing feats will be excluding test matches. After all, despite playing in virtually every test organised during her career span, Meg got the chance to bat in a test a total of 12 times, that’s less occasions than someone like Ricky Ponting or Steve Smith would get in a single average year during their careers.
Lanning batting in test match whites, an all too rare occurrence. Picture taken from here
Alright, back to mid-2014 and the newly anointed all-national captain, the 22 year old Lanning who already had three world cups to her name, one of which as skipper. In 2015 there weren’t any tournaments to win, so she won her first Ashes series as captain instead. 2016 wasn’t quite as dominant, Australia having to settle for 2nd place in the T20I world cup, and Lanning was dismissed for her first duck, though of course she couldn’t help but make history in the process, setting the record for most innings before being out for nought (this has since been broken). In 2017 she broke the record for international centuries in women’s cricket, but an ongoing injury concern meant she wasn’t able to contribute as much as usual to the ODI world cup that year, and Australia were eliminated in the semi-finals. It would be the only international tournament she played in where she wasn’t at least making the final. Following this early exit she underwent shoulder surgery and missed 8 months of cricket.
But 2018 she was right back to it, becoming the first ever Australian to notch 2000+ T20I runs (men or women) and then winning another world cup, this time hitting the winning runs in the final. 2019 saw another Ashes series victory (this one utterly dominant) and 2020 yet another world cup victory (there’s a lot of them because the ODI world cup, or the official women’s cricket world cup, is every 4 years, but the T20 world cup is every two years). Making history on an annual basis is her schtick, and she didn’t let up, 2021 her team broke the record for most consecutive ODI wins (men or women’s cricket). Then in 2022 she won the more prestigious 50-over version of the world cup for the second time (and first as captain) to equal Ponting’s record for most individual tournaments won by a captain. Not satisfied with that, 2022 also saw the first ever inclusion of women’s cricket at the commonwealth games, and of course Lanning captained the gold medal winning Australian side. Then, in 2023 she won the T20 world cup, again, to give her 7 international trophies as player (I mean 8 if you include gold medals), and a now record (in either men’s or women’s cricket) 5 as captain. Phew. Since then she has announced her retirement from international cricket, ending a relatively short career of 13 years. Short, but historic.
Historic, that’s the narrative I’m doubling down on here, because when researching Lanning that’s what jumps out at you. Check out her career boiled down into yearly blows, with history making moments highlighted:
2010
youngest ever Australian to score international century, men or women
2012
fastest century by an Australian woman
wins T20 World Cup
2013
wins ODI World Cup
2014
youngest ever Australian international captain, men or women
wins T20 World Cup
awarded ICC Women’s T20I player of the year
2015
won first Ashes series as captain
awarded ICC Women’s ODI player of the year
awarded Wisden’s Leading Woman Cricketer of the year
2016
sets record for most innings before first duck
2nd place in T20 World Cup
2017
sets record for most international centuries in women’s cricket
2018
first Australian to score 2000+ T20I runs, men or women
wins T20 World Cup
2019:
wins Ashes series
2020
wins T20 world cup
2021
sets record for longest winning streak in ODI history, men or women
2022
wins Ashes series, equaling record for most Women’s Ashes series won as captain
wins gold medal of inaugural inclusion of women’s cricket at the Commonwealth Games
wins ODI World Cup
made a Member of the Order of Australia
2023
wins T20 World Cup and breaks record for tournament wins as captain
Absolutely amazing career. At the time of writing this it’s only been a few weeks since she announced her retirement from international cricket, so I can’t comment on what her post cricket career was like. Though here’s hoping she pulls a Tom Brady and un-retires to win yet another title (though she already has 7, the same as Brady, and with less losses and in a shorter career…)
In terms of honours, she has won the ICC Women’s ODI cricketer of the year award, the ICC Women’s T20I cricketer of the year award, was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and has won the top award for Australian Women’s Cricket, the Belinda Clarke Award, 3 times. But these awards aren’t her true legacy, others have won them more times. And she didn’t routinely top the charts of annual run scorers, or tournament run scorers. No, her true legacy is her impact on the game, the dominance we talked about at the start. The ability to score big when it’s needed and lead her team to victory. She has more, and a lot more, international centuries than any other woman in cricket. No other captain in the history of ODI cricket, men or women, has a better winning percentage. No other captain in the history of international cricket, men or women, has won more trophies as captain. Meg Lanning doesn’t have the most runs in women’s international cricket (she’s 5th), or the best batting average (she’s 7th), but she has dominated the sport like no other, scoring far and away more centuries than the next best, and winning absolutely everything almost all the time.
But enough hinting at the stats, let’s get into it properly.
Lanning doesn't have all that many individual records, certainly not like some of the athletes we've covered before. But what she does have are impressive, incredibly so, as well as a host of records associated with her captaincy. This is an interesting concept and one I feel fans of other sports might be a little confused by. Why do I keep harping on about her achievements as captain? Well, in cricket the role of captain is a much more important role than other sports, at least those I am familiar with. Leadership is always an asset in team sports, but it's more than that in cricket. The captain dictates who bowls each over, how long their stints bowling will be, who to rotate through next. They (often with consultation with the bowler) set the field, establishing the strategy of the bowling attack. And if the captain is a batter they are expected to set the example with the bat. They don't have to consistently be the top scorer (though many are) but they rarely fail to contribute; they set the tone, and most importantly provide the grit and toughness for their team when things are going south. They are often heavily involved in team selection, and are the faces of the team to the public. They wear the blame for defeats, but often the accolades of victory go to the individuals who excelled instead of the captain. The prevalence and importance of professional coaching took a while to percolate through cricket because the captain had such an important role, and many of the duties we would associate with a coach were already being done by the captain.
So the records we will be delving into here are often related to those concepts about captaincy. And they’re all related to dominating the sport:
International centuries
Win streaks as captain
Winning percentage as captain
International trophies
Where the first is that idea of providing the big score when your team needs it, even if you don’t average as high as other teammates, the second shows the ability to carry momentum as a leader, the third illustrates sustained success over time, and the fourth is the ability to convert success into results when it matters most, on the biggest stages of international tournaments.
So, international centuries in women’s cricket. Due to the lack of test matches, and the huge proportion of T20s that make up modern cricketers international schedules, centuries are not as easy to come by as they are for men. To use the Virat Kohli comparison, he has 50 ODI centuries (the most of all time), but only 1 T20I century. It’s hard to score a 100 when there are so few overs up your sleeve. In the history of women’s cricket, only 15 players have managed more than 5 centuries in ODIs and T20Is:
And wow oh wow is Lanning out in front. And it’s not just totals either, check out what happens when adjust that graph from cumulative centuries to centuries per innings played:
So it’s not like her record for most centuries is bolstered by longevity, she scores them at a greater rate than anyone ever has who’s managed 6 or more in their career. In fact, there is only one player who has a higher rate, Jan Britten, who played in the 80s and 90s. Her century per innings rate in ODI’s is 8.5%, so just under one percentile above Lanning, but she only managed 5 tons in her limited overs career. So Lanning has the second highest rate ever, as well as by far and away the most in total.
Ok, let’s talk captaincy. In the late 90s, the captain of the Australian Women’s team was Belinda Clark. Now, Clark is an absolute legend, the annual award for best Australian Women’s Cricketer is called the Belinda Clark Award after all. She won the Ashes a lot, she won World Cups, and in the late 90s she captained her team to 17 straight ODI wins. Then, after losing two ODIs to New Zealand, she captained her team to another 16 straight. That’s 33 out of 35! The 17 straight record was more than any men’s team had ever accomplished. A few years later however this was no longer true, as Ricky Ponting captained his team to 21 straight ODI wins in 2003. This would stand unbeaten for 18 years before who else but Meg Lanning hunted his record down. From 2018 to 2021 the Australian Women’s team put together an unbeaten run that equaled, then exceeded, then shattered the Men’s achievement of 2003, eventually losing to India to make it a 26 game streak of ODI wins. Then, just to rub it in, after that single loss they won the next 15 straight too! That’s 41 out of 42 ODI wins in a 5 year span.
All in all there have been 7 Men’s team to have a win streak >10, check this out:
Very impressive by Ponting’s team in 2003. But the Women’s game sees more streaks, as they have had 11 instances of >10 wins in a row:
When we combine the two, most win streaks by either men’s or women’s teams, we have 18 teams with >10 ODI wins in a row. So let’s narrow it down and make it 13 or more.
This leaves 8 teams, only 2 of which are men’s results:
Damn…
Not only is Lanning’s team further ahead of the next best then 2nd place is ahead of 3rd, she and Belinda Clark are responsible for 4 out of the top 6 ever winning streaks in ODI history, men or women. Just insane.
But what if these were just freakishly good years, with a run of poor opponents and some flukish performances? Well, first off that's ridiculous, the nature of scheduling in Women’s cricket means these streaks were stretched over many years, but in case you’re still sceptical, let’s talk career winning percentages. Because T20Is are a relatively new introduction, and because tests are so rarely played in women’s cricket, ODIs are the best format for comparing players throughout history. In the men’s game, 12 captains in history have managed an ODI winning percentage above 60%:
We see the recurring figure of Ponting near the top there, with an impressive 71.7% of ODIs he captained resulting in wins. It’s not the best though, the winner of the first two ODI world cups, Clive Lloyd, reigns supreme with an incredible 76.2% win rate as captain. For every 4 games he captained he won 3 of them. But Jacob, why is that scale weird? Why is the top 90%? Well, check out the 8 captains of Women’s ODIs to also achieve a win rate above 60%:
There’s your answer reader! We need the scale to go to 90% because of the insane record of Meg Lanning. I mean, Rolton at 3rd, with 69.8%, is on par with 3rd place for the men, but Clark and Lanning leave the best of the men’s captains in the dust. But Lanning particularly so, she’s almost as far ahead of Clark as Clark is of Lloyd. Meg Lanning has captained the Australian Women’s ODI team in 78 matches, and she only lost 9 of them! What???
Her winning percentage of 88.5% in ODIs is truly insane, like in all of sports. Tom Brady is the winningest (a silly but useful Americanism) player in NFL history, and his Patriots had a win rate of 76.8%. Magic Johnson is the equivalent of Basketball, and his Lakers had a win rate of 74%. The equivalent in professional soccer is Zinchenko, who’s Arsenal side has a win rate of 82.3%. Then, legendary All Blacks captain Richie McCaw, captained his side in 111 test matches, winning 98, for a winning percentage of 88.3%. Meg Lanning’s Australian ODI side was more dominant than Brady’s Patriots, Magic’s Lakers, and even McCaw’s All Blacks. Honestly, I couldn’t find another team sport played at the highest level where the captain (or leader/most prominent face of the team) had a higher winning percentage, please let me know if you find one. There is a strong case that the Australian Women’s Cricket side of the last 10 years is the best team in the history of professional sports.
To back that up further, let’s look at silverware.
The trophies contested at an international level in cricket are adjudicated by the ICC and include:
Men’s:
Cricket World Cup (ODIs), 13 so far, ~ every 4 years
Champions Trophy (ODIs), 8 so far, ~ every 2 to 3 years
T20 World Cup (T20s), 8 so far, ~ every 2 years
World Test Championship (test matches), 2 so far, every 2 years
Women’s:
Women’s Cricket World Cup (ODIs), 12 so far ~ every 4 years
Women’s T20 World Cup (T20s), 8 so far ~ every 2 years
So off the bat we can see that there are more opportunities for men’s teams to acquire accolades, with 31 trophies claimed since 1973, compared to 20 since 1973, and at an ongoing rate of approximately 3.5 per two years compared to 1.5 every two years. Despite this hindrance, less than half as many trophies per year to contest in her career, Lanning has the record for the most trophies as a captain, and her team-mate, Ellyse Perry, has the most as an individual. That’s how dominant the Aussie women have been for the past decade!
Of the 51 trophies awarded by the ICC in the past 50 years, 20 captains have appeared in more than one final, but of those only 8 have won multiple trophies:
So, as always we ask ourselves, are her records breakable?
It’s very hard to imagine her records being broken. A few have been broken already, like most innings before first duck, and a few others are possible, like youngest Australian to score a century or youngest Australian to be captain. These only need a precocious talent to rise to the international scene at the right time. I mean, they’re unlikely, she was 18 for the century and beat the previous record for youngest captain by a year, but they’re the closest to breakable from her resume. She’s so far ahead of most centuries, despite calling time on her career after 13 years, it would take someone truly transcendent to eclipse that mark.
But her most unbreakable records are her success as a captain. These are so unbreakable because they represent both her own impact and the insane density of talent Australia had in a single generation. We will almost definitely never see another cricketer like Ellyse Perry, and to have the likes of Allyssa Healy, Alex Blackwell, Ashleigh Gardner, Ashleigh Gardner, Beth Mooney, Megan Schutt, Rachel Haynes, all playing at the same time. It really is like the men’s Australian test team of the early 2000’s, with players kept on the sidelines who would’ve dominated other generations but couldn’t make the first XI because so many all-time legends had cropped up together. But like Waugh and Ponting for the Australian test team at the turn of the millennium, Lanning was there to wield her golden generation with unprecedented (yes, record) success.
This combination is key, and it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone ever besting her ODI winning record or her array of trophies. I mean it’s silly, in the 13 years between her debut and retirement there have been 9 international trophies up for grabs. She won all but 2 of them, and 1 of those she was the runner up. No other leader playing in the highest level of their respective sport for so long can come close to her win record. And if anyone was to do it, the time was decades ago when the playing field was less competitive in international cricket. So with future contenders for these records carelessly playing in the future instead of the past, I think Lanning has some of the most unbreakable records yet.
I think Dan Liebke summarised it well in his book “The 50 Greatest Australian Cricketers* *of the past 50 years”, where he opened his passage on Lanning with this wonderful prose:
“As part of the famous Indianapolis speech in the movie Jaws, the character Quint, played by Robert Shaw, reveals the following: ‘Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes.’ Meg Lanning has the pitiless eyes of a shark, peering out from under her helmet as she ruthlessly goes after a bowling attack powerless to stop her. She also has the cold-blooded killer instinct of a shark. Meg Lanning may well be a shark” - the 50 Greatest Australian Cricketers* *of the past 50 years, 2020, pg 255
He then goes on to summarise her career much more neatly and enjoyably then I have managed (he is the professional after all), before finishing her entry with:
“Some species of sharks live for as long as 400 years, and while it would be optimistic to think that Lanning’s career can last that long, she should still have enough time to amass a tally of records so enourmous it may never be beaten” - pg 258
And in the 3 years between that book and her retirement she won multiple world cups and a gold medal. She had more success in that 3 years than all but 2 other captains in the history of the game (men’s or women’s) ever have, on top of her already record breaking span before the book was written. She came in at number 10 in Liebke’s top 50 of the past 50 years, one spot behind Ponting. In his defence at that stage in her career she had less trophies than Punter, but the years since she has obliterated (devoured perhaps) every captaincy record. I wonder how high she would rank in his list now?
But he was spot on about amassing that tally, her records may indeed never be beaten.
The best captain to lead a cricket side, and probably any team sport ever. Picture taken from here
As always thanks for reading! I am going to include some highlights of the legendary Lanning, but haven’t had the time yet, check back in a bit. Or, go here for a non curated version of what I will be including