These devils barely know what it feels like to lose a game. They have lost only 4 ODIs since winning the 2022 World Cup final until they crashed out of the World Cup, losing to India in the semifinals. It was not often they found their back against the wall, but somehow, that is where they were in many games this World Cup. But, it simply did not matter. They were 115-8 against Pakistan, before Mooney and Alana King put on a hundred run stand to take the total to something decent. Anything that resembles a semi-competitive score is all the bowling unit needs before they hunt you down, not even giving you a whiff of hope. Before the Pakistan game, they were 128-5 against New Zealand before Gardner stitched together partnerships with McGrath and Garth for the sixth and eighth wickets to post a target over 300. When they were down four wickets against England, it just felt like a routine before someone would mop up the chase, and so did Sutherland and Gardner. And when India was making steady progress against them in the run chase in the semifinal, they just knew someone would step up and get the job done for them. When Alyssa Healey and McGrath dropped dollies, and Alana King missed the simplest of run-outs, it did not matter — it was only a matter of time before someone else got the next breakthrough. It was all a well-rehearsed gallop to victory, until it wasn’t.

The sheer batting depth of this team is insane. Kim Garth bats at number nine. In a previous life, she was a top order bat for the Irish women. Alana King bats at ten, with an average of over 18 striking at 96. Any of them could easily have batted in the top 7 for many other teams this World Cup. This team plays eight players who can both bat and bowl, and two out of the remaining three are wicket-keepers. And when we say all-rounders, we are not talking about Shardul Thakur’s batting or Aiden Markram’s bowling. These are genuine strike options on both sides of the ball. As an ode to this invincible team (that sadly just became vincible), we make a case for why this Australian bowling unit is the best strike bowling unit to ever play the fifty over game.

The current Aussie women are not the only team ever to boast batting till number 10. Historically, teams have attempted to deepen their batting by incorporating multiple bowling options in the top six and bowlers who are handy with the bat — none more famously than England’s 2015-19 men’s squad, which sometimes played Adil Rashid and his 10 first-class centuries at number 11. Their flexibility was further helped by Stokes batting in the top 6 while bowling consistently for them, along with the pie-chuck off-spin they would occasionally get out of Joe Root. However, none could boast of three genuine frontline options (with both the bat and ball) in the top six: Ash Gardner, Annabel Sutherland, and Ellyse Perry. Any other team would have driven an all-rounder averaging under 25.6 at an economy of 4.4 into the ground, but this Australian team does not even bowl Perry much.

Moreover, extending your batting or bowling depth would probably mean playing a bunch of defensive all-rounders bowling dry economical spells through the middle overs. The 2015-19 Aussie men had Maxwell and Watson, or the formidable South African side from the turn of the century featured Kallis and Klusener. Most of these all-rounders are a downgrade to the frontline bowlers in the team (hello there, Michael Clarke). Neither the two Australian all-rounders nor the South Africans boasted a bowling strike rate better than 36. Hardik Pandya stands as a notable exception, striking every 27 balls between the 2019 and 2023 World Cups (when the average was 34 balls per wicket). Yet, he was consistently paired with Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja, both of whom are (extremely strong) defensive bowlers. The Aussie women have apparently missed the memo on how all-rounders are supposed to work. Both Ash Gardner and Annabel Sutherland have been consistently taking wickets just about every 26 balls since their 2022 World Cup triumph.

England’s men’s team from 2015-19 operated with a simple, audacious philosophy: out-bat the opposition. They hammered out, on average, 33 more runs per 50 overs than a typical team of their era — a record difference since we have ball-by-ball data. Their credo? Defensive cricket is only for wussies. Beyond the relatively ‘anchoring’ middle-order trio of Root, Morgan, and Stokes (all of whom still struck at over 90, with Morgan himself just a whisker shy of 100), the rest of the team consistently attacked at over a run-a-ball. Add to that their previously mentioned endless batting depth, and it becomes clear: the only real way to contain that English side was to take all ten wickets. Now, here’s the kicker: the current Aussie women are essentially the English men, but with the ball. Since their 2022 World Cup triumph, this Australian team has taken a wicket a staggering 6.77 balls quicker than an average ODI bowler—the highest strike rate relative to their era ever recorded. And, perhaps just to rub it in, the second-highest era-relative strike rate? That would be the previous iteration of the Aussie women (2017-2022) at 5.91! Destroying teams for 5 years and winning the world cup at the end of the cycle was not sufficient — they had to get a software upgrade that installed a virtual pet T-rex that wrecks some carnage on the side when they aren’t leading the massacre themselves.

Jess Jonassen, once holding a strong claim to be the best bowler in the world, perfectly illustrates Australia’s embarrassment of riches. She boasts a stellar career average of 19.6 and strikes every 29.5 deliveries. Her recent form is even more impressive: strike rates of 27.3 in 2022 and 24.9 in 2023, significantly better than the era’s average of 34 balls per wicket. Yet, despite these elite numbers, Jonassen found herself omitted from the World Cup squad. Their attack consists of Mollineaux, King, Gardner, Sutherland, and Garth, all boasting individual era-relative strike rates ranging from 5.72 to an incredible 11.69. Batting against them is like trying to outrun a pack of velociraptors—even a strong start means little. Opponents are relentlessly hunted down; a collapse can begin at any moment, and before anyone understands what hit them, the entire lineup is bundled out for a subpar total (cf. the South Africa game, who were at 42-2 at the end of ten overs, before Alana King returned figures of 7-2-18-7 to bowl them out for 97). Their primary strike unit is further bolstered by the containment unit — Megan Schutt, who often takes the new ball and comes back at the death, and Tahlia McGrath. This raw strength is evident in their record: across 37 ODIs since the 2022 World Cup, they’ve bowled out the opposition 24 times, failing to take at least 8 wickets on only five occasions. They have taken a ridiculous 339 of the possible 370 wickets that they could have taken during this period!

To truly grasp the rarity of the Australian women’s bowling attack, let’s play a little game: revisiting history to see if any legendary team could have consistently fielded such an artillery of strike bowlers. Simply finding five elite wicket-takers simultaneously is a monumental challenge. Even then, slotting them all into the same XI has often proved impossible. The fearsome West Indian sides typically relied on the part-time spin of Viv Richards or Larry Gomes to round out their attack. Pakistan’s dazzling 1990s lineup featured Wasim Akram whose strike rate nudged over 36. The South African line up from the turn of the century featured Shaun Pollock, but struck only every 40 balls. The great Australian men’s unit 2003-07 and Indian men 2019-23 had a rich buffet of strike options to choose from, but could not fit them in the same eleven. The Australians boasted a line-up consisting of McGrath, Bracken, Tait, Lee, Hogg (however difficult it might be to fathom that Hoggie was a strike option over a four year span) and Kasprowicz — all striking faster than the era strike rate of 36. Yet, more often than not, their fifth bowler was either Shane Watson or Andrew Symonds, both of them very defensive options with the ball. India, on the other hand, featured Hardik Pandya, who had an era-relative strike rate of 6.8. Leading the attack were the strike options in Shami, Siraj, Kuldeep, Chahal, Thakur and Prasidh Krishna (Shami’s differential was a stunning 8.88 balls per wicket!). However, Bumrah, Jadeja and Axar bowled a bulk of the overs — all incredibly hard to score off, but fundamentally defensive. While each of them went at less than 0.6 runs per over than expected, given the different phases of the game they operate in, all of them strike slower than the average bowler. Bumrah, in particular, was played out by batters in this cycle — needing 4.6 balls more than an average bowler per wicket.

Having 8 bowlers already gives them an insane amount of flexibility. On top of that, these bowlers are also not unidimensional like the pace bowling militia the current Aussie men have — Cameron Green, Mitch Marsh, Aaron Hardie, Mitch Owen, Marcus Stoinis — everybody fighting to bowl the same overs in the middle. Schutt and Garth take the powerplay, followed by King’s leg spin, Molineaux’s left-arm orthodox and Ash Gardner’s off-spin. Annabel Sutherland bowls her heavy balls mixed with crafty slower ones in the middle overs, before operating in the death alongside Ash Gardner, Megan Schutt and an occasional dose of Alana King. Tahlia McGrath and increasingly rarely Ellyse Perry can bowl a couple of filler overs to change ends or on a day exceptionally suited for fast bowlers. The time available in ODIs and the variety in the bowling attack allows Alyssa Healey to micro-spell her bowlers — she could bowl Ash Gardner for a spell of 4 overs, and she never has to bring her back if she thinks she is better served by the ball turning the other way. Or, if Danni Wyatt hates facing spin, fast bowlers can be as rare to find as water in the middle of the Sahara desert throughout her innings!

The parallel between the Aussie women and the English men 2015-19 only runs deeper. England perfected the art of dominating the middle overs with the bat — scoring close to run a ball, punctuated with occasional boundaries, a stark contrast to other teams who often adopted a non-aggression treaty between overs 11 and 40. The Australian women’s team have hunted with a similar ferociousness in the middle overs with the ball. The notion of containing opponents by merely rotating through drab part-timers feels entirely anachronistic when put side-by-side with their brand of cricket. Their effectiveness is evident in impressive era-relative strike rates of 7.67 for overs 11-20, 8.89 for 20-30, and 11.12 for 30-40. Of the total 370 wickets that they could have possibly gotten in the 37 games that they have played during this cycle, 181 — over 53% — have come in the middle overs. Their overall era-relative strike rate of 9.74 through the middle stands as the third best in history, surpassed only by the Sri Lankan men (2023-25) at 10.57 and the Ireland women (2017-22), though the latter played only five games in that period. For a bowling attack as elite as theirs, committing to taking wickets have meant trading off with the rate at which they leak runs — they are not comfortably the most economical middle-overs team in history. They are only the eleventh best. Yet, they are much better at taking wickets: there is simply no weak link in their never-ending procession of middle-overs enforcers. Sophie Molineux leads this charge with a ridiculous era-relative strike rate of 21.82 in the middle overs, followed by Annabel Sutherland and Ashleigh Gardner, both of whom strike 14 balls quicker than expected through this phase. Alana King rounds out the battery, having a meek strike rate differential of only 6.5 in comparison.

Unlike some historically bowler-heavy sides, the Australian women consistently aim to dominate games with both bat and ball. They’ve maintained an impressive strike rate of over 97.22, marking them as the quickest-scoring team in this cycle. Nothing underscores their superiority more than the significant difference between the economy rate of their batters (runs scored per six balls) and that of their bowlers. They score a whopping 1.12 runs more per over than they concede – for perspective, this effectively translates to scoring 56 runs more than their opposition batters can manage. Furthermore, they take wickets 10.47 balls faster than they lose them, and they score over 15.31 runs per wicket more than their opponents. The English women, a distant second in all three of these metrics, with an opposition-relative economy 0.94, opposition-relative strike rate 7.02 and opposition relative average of 11. The only team that surpasses the current Aussie women in all these statistics is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Aussie women from the previous cycle. That earlier team boasted even more remarkable numbers: 1.24 runs per over, 19 balls per wicket, and 23 runs per wicket better than their opponents. While the current side bats quicker than the previous one (whose average strike rate was a tad above 90), the earlier side was superior at conserving wickets, averaging 44.43 runs per wicket compared to 36.75 in the current cycle. These two Australian women’s sides are truly miles ahead of any other team in history. For instance, the Indian men’s team from 2015-19 had an opposition-relative strike rate of over 13, but scored only 0.38 runs per over quicker than their opponents. The great Australian men’s team of 2003-07 had an opposition-relative strike rate of over 11 but opposition-relative economy was 0.57. No other team comes close to the two Aussie women’s sides in outperforming their opponents by such margins. These two Aussie sides also hold the record for the best and second-best difference in average runs scored per wicket since ball-by-ball data became available.

When it comes to Australian women’s cricket, especially after the powerplay, their dominance with both bat and ball is just astounding. A couple of historical teams, like the great Aussie men’s team 2003-07, actually had better opposition-relative strike and economy rates in the powerplay than the current Aussie women. The Indian men’s team 2019-23 and current England women have a slightly better opposition-relative strike rate in that initial phase. However, once those field restrictions were lifted, the Aussie women 2017-22 were in a league of their own – miles ahead of everyone else in both the middle overs and at the death. And get this: the current Aussie women are nearly as good, often ranking as the second-best in pretty much every aspect during those phases too. The Indian men 2019-23 had a slightly better opposition-relative strike rate in the middle overs compared to the current Aussies, coming largely on the back on the knack of simply not getting out – for example, between overs 30-40, their opposition struck once every 64 balls, i.e, less than once a game! In contrast, the Aussie women are all about taking risks and outscoring their opponents significantly in the middle overs, hitting over a run quicker than their rivals, compared to the Indian men’s 0.27. And finally, when it comes to the death overs, the Aussie women are clearly the second-best team out there, both in how quickly they snag wickets and how fast they pile on the runs compared to their own batters.

The radar chart with phase-wise position relative stats.

In a sport always searching for the next innovation, the Australian women aren’t just far ahead; they’ve achieved cricketing alchemy. Forget trying to bat out 50 overs against them — you might as well hunt for the Holy Grail while simultaneously attempting to win an Oscar with a chorus line of frogs. This is precisely what fighting a hydra feels like — with multiple faces coming at you all the time. Defeating the hydra was one of the twelve impossible labours given to Hercules. Beating this team is an equally hard task. But, sometimes when Hercules does fall the hydra, the best way forward is to tip your hat to Hercules for a job well done and write an ode to the ruthless hydra.