Fitness, resilience key to massive 2024-25 season: Flegler

Building fitness and resilience will form a key part of Australia’s preparations for a packed 2024-25 summer that will include a T20 World Cup title defence and a home Ashes, national selector Shawn Flegler says.

Australia wrapped up their white-ball tour of Bangladesh last week and their next international series is not until September, when they will host New Zealand in three T20Is immediately prior to their departure for the T20 World Cup.

It is the longest break between series Australia have had in several years, but comes after a hectic 2023-24 season that started against West Indies in September and featured almost non-stop cricket through to last Thursday’s final T20I in Dhaka.

While some of their rivals including England and New Zealand will be in action during the winter, Flegler said Australia’s preparations would look a little different – but be no less thorough.

“We’ve got a good opportunity now for the girls to have a break and then get back into their fitness programs,” Flegler said on Monday following the release of CA’s 2024-25 women’s contract list.

“We’ll have a couple of camps up here in Brisbane (in June and July) and then some players are heading off to go and play in The Hundred so they’ll get some game opportunities there, (followed by) those three T20s against New Zealand.

“We’ll have two warm-up games at the start of the World Cup … we believe that’s still the ideal preparation.

“We’re still working on an A series against India A over here and whoever doesn’t go to The Hundred will have a chance to play in that as well, so there’s still plenty of opportunities towards the back end of the winter.

“But we still believe that fitness prep over the next couple of months is going to be really important not just for the World Cup, but we’ve got a huge summer ahead with the couple of series against India and New Zealand and then an Ashes at home as well.

“So we want our players to be fit and resilient and still going and performing at a high level at the back end of the season.”

The World Cup, which will be played in Bangladesh, will be followed by WBBL|10 in October and November, two ODI series against India and New Zealand in December, and the Ashes in January through to early February.

Flegler said the recent trip to Bangladesh had been a valuable opportunity to learn about the conditions, even if all their matches were in Dhaka, rather than Sylhet, where Australia are expected to play all of their group games.

“The research we’ve done and after speaking to people, (we’ve heard) the Sylhet wicket is actually quite a good wicket, got a little bit more pace in it,” Flegler said.

“Certainly the games in Dhaka were a challenge, with very spin-friendly and slow wickets.

“But that was a great opportunity for everyone to not only play in those conditions but they took the opportunity to train quite a bit and keep learning about their game and how they can adapt to those conditions when we come back in September, October.

“The weather is going to be very different when we get back there, hot and humid – we got a taste of that towards the back end of the tour when it was 37, 38 degrees.

“So the message to our group was fitness is going to be extremely important when that tournament comes around in six months’ time.”

One ongoing concern for Australia is the fitness of Darcie Brown, who was ruled out on the eve of the tour of Bangladesh after scans revealed a stress injury to the navicular bone in her left foot, the front foot in her bowling action.

Fellow express quick Tayla Vlaeminck spent two lengthy periods on the sidelines in recent years due to serious navicular stress injuries and Cricket Australia’s medical staff would be desperate to avoid a similar scenario with Brown.

“We don’t have too much more information … she’ll have another scan in a few weeks and that’ll determine what happens after that,” Flegler said.

“But everything is tracking okay, it’s just we just need to offload the foot and then heal it.”