Alyssa Healy insists the forthcoming ODI World Cup in India will not be her curtain call. The Australia captain, working her way back from a run of foot and knee troubles, is instead planning to stick around for the entire 2025-26 home season – and to reclaim the wicketkeeping gloves well before that.
Healy’s comeback should be rubber-stamped on Tuesday when she is named in an Australia A squad to meet India A in Queensland in August. Those fixtures would be her first since January’s Ashes, where a stress fracture forced her to miss matches and stand aside as keeper in others.
The 35-year-old admits the stop-start nature of the past 18 months – foot injury at the 2024 T20 World Cup, a shortened WBBL, no ODIs in New Zealand, no WPL – has tested her patience. Yet the downtime seems to have nudged any retirement plan further away, not closer.
“It’s probably shifted a little bit,” Healy told AAP. “It’s made me realise that I still want to do a little bit more than maybe what I thought. At the same time, sometimes there’s stuff in life that are a little bit more important than pulling on the green and gold. So it’s just a constant reassess.”
The immediate ambition is clear enough: a home summer that includes the multi-format series against India in February and March. “But at the moment I definitely want to play a home summer. I want to bring the World Cup home, but also to play against India,” she said.
Tuesday also happens to mark 100 days until Australia open their World Cup defence against New Zealand. With a squad in transition since Meg Lanning’s retirement in 2023, the tournament already looks a genuine examination of depth and leadership.
Back when Healy took the captaincy she framed it as a short-to-medium-term project aimed squarely at the World Cup. “That was one of my goals, putting a timeline on it and saying this is where I could take this group, even not knowing what I was going to do personally,” she explained. “It definitely was a big focus of mine, to get the group to a place to compete at this World Cup, and win the trophy.”
Doing what no women’s side has achieved for almost four decades – back-to-back titles – is an added spur. “It’s not so much about the captaincy [driving me], or ticking one more box. It’s just that I want to win a World Cup for Australia, and no one has gone back-to-back, which is a real motivator.”
The task will be physically demanding. Nine matches inside 32 days, in Indian conditions, can empty even the fittest of players. Healy is already planning her workload, starting with the three Australia A games, followed by full-international ODIs in India. “According to science, the ODI World Cups is one of the heaviest loads that we go through as cricketers,” she noted. “My aim is to play every game of that World Cup. So to make sure I can do that’s important.”
Selectors are unlikely to rush her. Beth Mooney and Georgia Redmayne can keep if required, and Australia have form for sharing the job when injuries bite. All the same, the squad is steadier when Healy is behind the stumps, barking the angles and tempo.
For now she is content to deal with tape, rehab bands and carefully planned overs, rather than any grand farewell speech. The World Cup might be looming, but, in Healy’s mind at least, life after cricket can wait a little longer.
