As Meg Lanning, the Australia captain and premier top-order batter, approaches ten years in international cricket, we asked her to pick her three best innings. She took us down memory lane and into the heart of three distinctively match-winning Lanning hundreds, all accomplished away from home.
152* off 135 balls vs Sri Lanka, Bristol, 2017 ODI World Cup
"Lanning 152* trumps Atapattu 178*" read the headline for ESPNcricinfo's report on the league-stage match. That's all the background you need to grasp the full impact of Lanning's 11th ODI hundred that culminated in her personal ODI best.
Lanning: "We were a bit stunned, to be honest. [Chamari] Atapattu had come out and whacked us all around the park. It probably wasn't something we expected and that was part of the problem, I guess. They made 250-260; it wasn't an outrageous score, but just the fact that perhaps it wasn't a team we expected [to perform that way]. But she played unbelievably well. I remember saying to Ellyse Perry before we went out to bat, 'We've got to do something here. It's up to us to really win the game for us.' A 150 not out chasing, in a World Cup game where we were under the pump a little bit - that was why that was special."
133* off 63 balls, 1st T20I vs England, Chelmsford, 2019 Ashes
Lanning was returning from shoulder surgery that had kept her out of action for the better part of a year, but you wouldn't know it from this innings: her first 50 came off 24 balls; her century, brought up with a mighty blow off Anya Shrubsole, took just 51. Her new T20I best, also then the highest innings in women's T20Is, led her side to their highest T20I total.
Lanning: "I hadn't been hitting the ball too well, to be honest. It sort of came from nowhere (smiles). I played some shots on that day that I wouldn't usually play. Everything came out of the middle, everything went in the gaps. It just clicked. It was just one of those days when you feel you are one step ahead of what the bowlers are trying to do and the fielders. You've got to make the most of it when that happens. That was good fun."
114* off 113 balls, 2nd ODI vs New Zealand, Mt Maunganui, 2016
Chasing 207, Lanning dominated the innings from the moment she arrived at No. 3 in the fifth over. With Perry, she added 147 for the third wicket, en route to completing her seventh ODI ton and sealing an emphatic eight-wicket victory. Lanning would make another hundred in the third ODI.
Lanning: "It was the Rose Bowl series against one of our most familiar opponents. We were under the pump because they had smashed us in the T20s in Australia [in 2012-13]. We were heading into the 2016 T20 World Cup. We lost the first ODI, so we were struggling a bit. We came good in the last two. That century was a memorable one."