Meg Lanning’s international retirement marks the end of one of the greatest eras of international sporting success Australia has ever seen.
A 13-year international career featuring 241 games, a decade-long stint as skipper, seven World Cup titles, a Commonwealth Games gold — Lanning’s sporting CV is littered with highlights.
Lanning made her bow on the international stage as an 18-year-old.
She made her mark almost immediately, becoming the youngest Australian — aged 18 years and 288 days — to score an international century when she scored 104 not out against England at the WACA Ground in 2011.
It was just the second ODI in what turned into a 103-game ODI career.
Add to that 132 T20Is — including a record 100 as captain — plus six Tests and her international career has bought her 8,352 runs including 17 international centuries.
With so many incredible moments to choose from, it says everything about the 31-year-old as a leader that she chose Australia’s lowest ebb as the moment that stands out most.
“In terms of on the field, 2017, at that World Cup [things] didn’t go to plan,” Lanning said outside the MCG, the scene of her and her Australian team’s greatest triumph.
“But, you look back on that and you learn so much, I learned so much.
“We probably wouldn’t have had the success that we had if that moment hadn’t have happened.
“It was awful at the time, it was a really good reality check and the successful five years post that.
“I’ve been involved in a lot of teams and the way we were able to come together and be on the same page, on and off the field, just [to] make things work.
“It was a bit of magic coming together and I’ve probably never experienced that before or after, in terms of everything coming together.
“The group really stood up through that period.”
That 2017 failure, a semifinal defeat in Derby at the hands of India, when Harmanpreet Kaur’s unbeaten 171 ensured Australia missed the final for only the second time since 1993.
But it was only a blip.
By then, Lanning had already won an ODI World Cup and two T20 crowns, the second of which came as skipper, but that defeat seemed to spur the Aussies onto greater heights, blowing away every other women’s cricket program going to sit as undisputed world number one.
It is fitting that her final international game ended with Lanning showered in confetti at Cape Town’s famous Newlands Ground, with the T20 World Cup trophy her Australia team had previously lifted in front of 86,174 supporters at the MCG two years earlier, back in her hands.
It capped an era of unparalleled dominance throughout which Lanning’s stoic, immovable calmness was an ever-present touchstone.
Unflappable amidst the chaos of international cricket, Lanning’s stern gaze from inside the fielding ring conveyed a calculating tactical acuity matched only by her extraordinary ability with the bat.
While her teammates often went about their business with a glee that only comes from the knowledge of their superiority, Lanning’s composure only rarely cracked during the heat of battle.
The 31-year-old leaves behind a legacy that will be near-impossible to match as captain.
From the moment she was appointed as a 21-year-old, the Singapore-born batter was leadership personified.
Of course, she had the players. Didn’t she just.
What skipper wouldn’t have relished having generational talents such as Elysse Perry or Alyssa Healy to call upon?
But sometimes the mark of a leader is not just building up a team to be greater than the sum of its disparate parts.
Sometimes, being a great leader is about making sure those great players are all pulling in the same direction, in pursuit of a common cause. Greatness.
The results speak for themselves.
A total of five world titles as skipper — four T20 World Cups and one Cricket World Cup crown — makes her the most successful Australian cricket captain of all time.
Add that inaugural 2022 Commonwealth Games gold to that list, plus a couple of Ashes series, and her sporting CV looks pretty much complete.
But her greatest legacy will undoubtedly be as the leader of a team that has thrown women’s sport into a new era.
“Hopefully [my career has had] a positive influence,” she said.
“From where the game was when I started, the opportunity for young girls to play the game, they were few and far between.
“I played all my junior cricket in boys teams and now there’s so many options for young girls and boys to play.
“I hope that young girls have followed my journey a little bit and have been positively influenced to go out there and chase their dreams and see what’s possible.
“It’s great that it’s changed a lot.”
The notoriously private Lanning may have struggled with that status as an icon of women’s sport, and as she acknowledged herself, that might take some time to bed in.
But as she chases her own new dreams away from the pressure cooker of international cricket, she will always be able to look back on her career as straddling the defining moments when Australia’s women’s cricket team stood up to be counted — and the country stood up with them.
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