Former Australia skipper on life after international retirement as she prepares to make her Hundred debut
Valkerie Baynes23-Jul-2024Meg Lanning didn’t set out to be a hero when she spoke out about the health battles that led to her international retirement, it was more about setting the record straight.But if her revelations that she was “over-exercising” to the point of “obsession” as a way of feeling in control amid the intense pressure of international touring and captaincy help break the façade that our sporting idols have it all together, she says that’s a good thing.Lanning is set to make her Women’s Hundred debut on Wednesday for London Spirit against Southern Brave. It is a competition lauded as a way of nurturing cricket’s fan and participation base among girls and women as well as developing elite talent at the highest level of competition.Lanning has spent long enough in the latter, having led Australia to four T20 and one ODI World Cup title, to understand what her decision to speak out may mean to others.Her retirement from international cricket in November 2023 came as a shock, despite her absence from three Australia series that year – including the Women’s Ashes due to an undisclosed medical issue – and the 2022 Hundred, where she was due to play for Trent Rockets but took a break for personal reasons immediately after leading her country to a Commonwealth Games gold medal.It was only in April of this year that the extent of her health battles became apparent when she told the Howie Games podcast: “I was over-exercising and under-fuelling. I got to the point where I was doing about 85-90km [running] a week. I was in denial. It became a bit of an obsession.”
“Just because we’re sportspeople out on TV maybe looking like we’ve got everything together, we probably don’t”Meg Lanning
Given that she became used to functioning under such extreme conditions, Lanning says healing isn’t an overnight fix, but she is now feeling “quite good” with a better balance in life, even if that’s “still a work in progress”.”The key message for me is, you don’t just all of a sudden work things out and everything’s cool,” Lanning tells ESPNcricinfo. “You go through your ups and downs and stuff and I’m still working my way through stuff as well. I certainly haven’t got it all worked out, but that’s part of life and trying to navigate that can be tricky at times.”If what Lanning has gone through can help someone else, all the better, she says.”When I spoke about it, I’m not sure what the intention of it was, I guess it was just getting my side of the story out there a little bit because it was sort of left up to people to make their own story up a little bit,” Lanning says. “That was me, part of it, because I didn’t give too much information initially.”But I feel like the sort of things that I work my way through are not unique, they’re probably a lot more common out there than what people think or talk about.”Whether that has a positive impact on other people, I don’t know. If it does, that’s great because talking about this sort of stuff is a really good thing and I think it does, not normalise it, but it does just show that there’s a lot more people probably going through things than you realise, and just because we’re sportspeople out on TV maybe looking like we’ve got everything together, we probably don’t.”From that perspective, it could be a really good learning opportunity for young girls out there to just understand that things don’t need to be excellent all the time. You go through your ups and downs, but you can work your way through it.”Related
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Now with time on her hands, Lanning is enjoying seeing more of family and friends and exploring options outside of cricket for when her franchise career comes to an end. While in England for the Hundred, she will be working on assessments for a board of directors course while enjoying just being part of a team.Among the hardest things about captaining her country, Lanning says, was time spent away from home as well as all the external responsibilities which come with the job. Not to mention leadership itself, which she says created some distance between her and her team-mates, making life on the road even more lonely.Lanning captained Melbourne Stars during the most recent edition of the WBBL late last year and Delhi Capitals in the 2024 edition of the WPL. Apart from a handful of games with Victoria over the past year, Lanning has barely known a time when she wasn’t leading the side.At London Spirit, she will be captained by one of her fiercest rivals on the international stage, England skipper Heather Knight.”I’m looking forward to playing alongside Heather,” Lanning says. “She’s obviously very experienced as a player and a captain, so I’m looking forward to learning a little bit off her and just being part of a team really.”I haven’t done a lot of playing without being captain, so that’s something that I’m looking forward to, just rolling around as a player and trying to contribute to as many wins as I can. I’ll help Heather out if she needs it, but I don’t think she needs too much help. She knows what she’s doing.”Just being able to be a player and enjoy that aspect of it and just enjoying meeting a new team and becoming part of that and playing with some really good freedom and not having all the other stuff to worry about, it’s something I’m excited to do.”Lanning announcing her retirement from international cricket•Getty ImagesWhile Lanning is fortunate to have retired at a time when playing on the franchise circuit is more lucrative than ever before while only requiring short bursts of overseas travel, at 32 and with so many cricketing achievements to her name, playing purely for enjoyment is still something of a fresh concept.”It’s still becoming a bit of a new routine, but I still love the playing part of it,” she says. “Opportunities like this in the Hundred give me the chance to fill my bucket with that, and then I get to go and do some other things too. So it’s still a little bit of a transition phase, but so far so good.”I’ve got some good experience across a long time, so any team I play in, I want to try and give some of that off to the younger players or other people I play with and be a positive influence on them. But it is really as simple as just enjoying playing and trying to win as many games as I can for each team.”Off the field, I’m not sure, I’m still in that working-it-out phase of what the next bit looks like and eventually, when I do stop playing altogether, where I go with that. I don’t have the answer. That’s hopefully part of the plan over the next few years.”
