Alyssa Healy rejigs wicketkeeping technique to overcome injury woes

Sydney: Australia captain Alyssa Healy has made subtle adjustments to her wicketkeeping technique to help reduce the physical strain on her body ahead of the upcoming ODI World Cup in India and Sri Lanka.

Healy hasn’t taken up the gloves in a competitive match since the ODI series against England during the Ashes in January. During that series, she played the Test as a specialist batter due to a recurrence of a foot injury initially sustained at the previous year’s T20 World Cup. A separate knee injury also cut short her WBBL campaign.

She explained that while the changes may not be obvious to the eye, they involve adopting a slightly more upright stance – a hybrid style blending elements of wicketkeeping techniques typically taught in Australia and England.

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“We’ve been taught how to wicket keep a certain way in this country for an extended period of time,” Healy said at Cricket Australia’s event.

“At the end of the day, it’s not overly efficient on our bodies, and doing it at 35 is not ideal.

“We’ve just been looking at ways to make it a little bit easier for some ageing joints and trying to keep things moving the way they should. It’s been a nice learning experience later in my career, so hopefully it pays off.”

Healy shared more details about the changes, explaining that they stemmed from discussions with a podiatrist she had been consulting during her recovery from the recent injury.

“One of them actually worded it to me like when, and I’m not comparing myself to him, but when Cristiano Ronaldo started to get towards the back end of his career, they changed positions for him to make it a little bit easier on the body,” Healy told ESPNcricinfo. “It was interesting and I said, well, how do we do that in the game of cricket? Like you can’t really change positions, but can we change things technically to make things more efficient? And we just played around with it.

“(Looking at) some of the stressful parts of my job and what it’s doing to some of the joints in my body and how do I get the best out of myself for the back end of my career. So we just tinkered around with it and it’s just really simply, it’s kind of like a bit of a hybrid model between what the English do and what we do.

“We’ve all been traditionally taught to stay low and come up with the ball and that’s fine until your knees and your feet can’t allow you to do that anymore. So just been playing around with how to get to my power position a little bit differently.”

Healy is set to resume wicketkeeping in the upcoming Australia A series against India A, aiming to be fully fit to take on the role behind the stumps at the World Cup, which begins in late September. Australia will warm up for the tournament with a three-match ODI series against India.

“I’ll get a red-hot crack at it in the ODI fixtures in that A-series, so we’ll get a better look at how things are working,” she said. “My goal is to be there and playing in the World Cup as a wicketkeeper, so hopefully that pans out.”

The multiformat series against India includes three T20Is, three ODIs, and concludes with a day-night Test match at the WACA in Perth.