The most prolific bowler in women’s T20Is talks about how she developed her key weapon, and her advocacy for various social issues
Firdose Moonda18-Jan-2025Megan Schutt doesn’t make it sound like she had a lot to work with.She described her pace as “perfect to be hit” and her action as “pretty horrible”. But two decades after she first took to cricket as a self-confessed “late bloomer”, she is the leading wicket-taker in women’s T20Is and has the most wickets in T20 World Cups. None of that happened by chance, but there was some kismet in how Schutt became an inswing bowler.Her cricketing journey started with her as the only girl in a group of boys, then “went a little backward” when she joined an all-girls’ team that played with a soft ball. She was then recruited into the age-group structures. “I bowled probably just straighties,” she says. “I was not so cluey about cricket or how to make the ball swing.” But a stress fracture she suffered at 16 forced her to think about her game.Related
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“I had to change my action a little bit and it changed my wrist somehow and turned me into an inswinger [bowler],” she said at the T20 Women’s World Cup in Dubai last year. “I can’t even tell you how – it was not on purpose, it was not shaped by anyone. I changed a little bit of my jump because I used to jump directly up. I then became a swing bowler.”It didn’t take her too long to see the advantages. “No one really bowled inswing when I was growing up, so it was just nice to be different,” she said. “Because I didn’t have the raw pace, if I didn’t have the swing, it would be very boring, I liked the X factor of how the ball moved and decided I would just rather focus on that than trying to bulk up and bowl fast when everyone was just getting injured anyway, so I stuck to what I knew.”Schutt may not be the biggest fan of her own bowling action but there’s no denying it has been effective•Getty ImagesWithin three years of that, Schutt was called up to Australia’s ODI squad and was given the new ball on debut but went wicketless. After picking up two wickets in her next match, she was included in the squad for the 2013 World Cup, against all expectation,. “My first two games were very average in my opinion, and so when I got the call, I was shocked. Obviously I was also absolutely over the moon, but I just didn’t expect it and I thought I was just going there to serve drinks, but it turned out extremely differently.”Schutt ended up playing every game and was the tournament’s leading wicket-taker, which set the tone for a career of big-tournament success. Looking back more than a decade later, she’s only willing to take some of the credit for that breakthrough performance. “It helps when you’re new and no one knows who you are and what you do and you get a little bit of beginner’s luck,” she said. “I was just lucky to start with a bang.”This may sound a bit like she struggled with imposter syndrome but it was actually complete ignorance of the kind of environment she was stepping into: a team that was way ahead of its time, where professional structures were developed as early as 2008 and a winning culture was well established early.”I was so ill-informed,” Schutt said. “I didn’t know much about the whole cricketing world and probably didn’t know there was an Australian women’s cricket team until I was about 16. I didn’t know they were in their own dominant era and I probably didn’t grasp the concept of what I was a part of until I really appreciated my spot in the side.”I guess that came with the patch of learning, hard work and discipline. I didn’t deserve my position in the XI when I first came, so I definitely earned that eventually, but it took some time.”Rainbow warrior: off the field, Schutt has advocated for gay rights and other causes•Getty ImagesAustralia did not make the final of the next ODI World Cup, in 2017, after also losing in the 2016 T20 World Cup final to West Indies. The 2017 defeat to India in the semi-final had a massive impact because it was seen as an indicator that power dynamics in the women’s game were shifting. At least that is how Schutt would label it. “Everyone talks about the gap [between Australia and the rest]. I hate that. Other teams are building and it’s absolutely amazing because we’re only going to get more and more competitive teams,” she said.The last year underlines that point. Sri Lanka won T20 series in England and South Africa, and Bangladesh won an ODI and a T20 for the first time in South Africa. Among the results that affected Schutt directly, West Indies beat Australia in a T20 in Australia in 2023, and so did South Africa the following year. In two of the upsets of the year, West Indies knocked England out of the T20 World Cup in the group stage; South Africa won the semi-final of that tournament, against Australia; and New Zealand took the title after a string of defeats earlier in the year.Schutt, who had no boundaries scored off her in the first three matches of last year’s T20 World Cup, and had the second-lowest economy rate, will have been disappointed not to end up with the trophy, but secretly she might also have been pleased to see the game grow. “We’re not unbeatable. We would never say that we are, and we definitely want other teams to develop,” she said. “Realistically, you want this to be a 16-team tournament.”As the men’s cricketing world looks to concentrate resources and fixtures around the Big Three and there’s talk of a two-tier Test league, Schutt’s expansionist view makes her refreshingly different but that’s only the half of it. Off the field, she is known for being the most vocal member of the Australia team on a range of social issues.In you go: Schutt swings one through Tammy Beaumont’s defences in a 2023 Ashes game•PA Photos/Getty ImagesIt started with a personal quest: her advocacy for gay marriage when it became a subject of a postal-order survey in Australia in 2017. By then, Schutt and her partner, Jess Holyoake, were in a serious relationship and ready to take the next step. They were initially considering going to New Zealand, where same-sex marriage was legalised in 2013, but decided to wait and see if it would be possible to do it at home, all the while advocating for their rights.”One of my favourite quotes is, if you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married, and it’s as simple as that,” Schutt said. “Jess and I are two very different humans and she was a bit scared to have the pride flag out on the window, but I said, this is exactly the time we need to be showing our flag and making sure we’re all together on this. I was pretty vocal about it.”A little under two-thirds of Australians (61.6%) voted in favour of same-sex marriage, a number that disappointed Schutt because “that’s still 38% that don’t agree with it”, which makes her feel uncomfortable. “There was a lot of misinformation out there and the campaign for the ‘no’ vote was pretty brutal,” she said. “Some of the pamphlets we got when we were living in Brisbane were pretty woeful, and I remember burning a couple of them in the sink of our little unit.”Since then, Schutt has gone on to campaign in the Indigenous Voices Referendum, which sought an alteration to the Australian constitution that would recognise indigenous Australians. And she raises awareness about the plight of Palestinians on her social media platforms. She is particularly moved by the deaths of children there, especially after her own child was born in 2021.Schutt, right, with her partner Jess Holyoake and their daughter Rylee, after the 2022 T20 World Cup win•Getty ImagesRylee now three, is what Schutt describes as a “wild child,” who was born three months prematurely and is autistic. That has given Schutt two other causes to raise awareness for. She is open about the challenges of going through neonatal intensive care and of living with neurodiversity. “Having Rylee early was really scary but it banded us together and it just shifted my whole world. It put cricket into perspective – suddenly that wasn’t the be-all and end-all. I didn’t realise that I probably had it on too much of a pedestal,” she said. “It’s also been the most amazing journey of my emotional side of things and seeing how I’d sometimes shut things off. It makes you do a lot of self-reflecting.”She has now done a “180-degree flip as a person, except for my sense of humour” and described motherhood as a process of finding out “who I am more and who I want to be and breaking some cycles that you know were there and you didn’t realise it as a kid”.Does that mean there’s a potential future as a human-rights campaigner? “I’m still trying to figure that out,” she said. “I want to do something that feels really worthwhile, and I’d like to do a little bit of coaching.”I’d love to teach inswingers around the world. It’s a real niche. I understand the art to it and I understand the game pretty well, and I feel like no one currently in bowling coaching around the world completely understands inswing bowling and the niches of it, and so I’d obviously love to do all kinds of bowling coaching. I’d love to teach inswingers around the world.”And this time, with plenty to work with.