Australian cricket has a GOAT, a spin king and now it looks like there’s another spinner to crown. Alana King’s hot streak has been truly special.
Alana King began 2022 uncapped at the international level, but if her recent hot streak is anything to go by, she’ll have plenty more global success to come.
Fresh off the high of Australia winning the first ever Commonwealth Games gold medal for Women’s T20 cricket, King stepped straight into the Women’s Hundred competition, dominating on debut.
It hadn’t been long since she was robbed of a Comm Games hat-trick, but the wounds of that missed chance were put to bed in her first game for the Trent Rockets.
King claimed the first-ever Women’s Hundred hat-trick, finishing with figures of 4-15 and 13 dot balls from her 20-ball spell, and has continued the dominance since.
After three games, King sits atop the wicket-taking leaderboard with five, an average of 8.20 and boasting the best ‘economy per hundred’, having conceded just 41 runs from her 60 balls in the competition so far.
Her latest achievement is just as impressive as the hat-trick too – conceding just eight runs from her 20-ball spell against the Oval Invincibles. King bowled ten consecutive dot balls to South African Marizanne Kapp.
The spell ended with 15 dot balls total, a remarkable effort in the Rockets’ ultimately unsuccessful defence of their score of 112.
Her hot-streak is certainly not limited to her impact in The Hundred, however.
You could argue it started back in January, where after a title-winning WBBL|07 campaign with the Perth Scorchers at the end of 2021, she was selected for not one, but three international debuts in the space of 14 days.
The leg-spinner made an immediate impact on T20 debut, the first of her maiden internationals. And selectors had seen enough, becoming a member of the Test and ODI sides not long after.
Fast-forward nearly seven months, and King has not just won a Comm Games gold, but also been a member of Australia’s Women’s Ashes and ODI World Cup-winning squads.
The World Cup final against England showed King’s love for a big occasion, as she took 3/64 from her ten overs, including the vital wicket of England’s skipper Heather Knight.
In the lead-up to the Comm Games was when the streak really started to come to life, however, with a dominant Tri-Series against Ireland and Pakistan a couple of weeks out laying the foundation for her current stretch of success.
King began the series with a bang, taking three wickets in an over in the washed-out opener against Pakistan.
She followed up figures of 3/8 in the first game with 3/9 in the subsequent one, as a two-wicket effort later in the series saw her finish the series with an average of 5.75 with the ball.
While she didn’t star with the ball in the opening match of Australia’s Comm Games campaign, she played a pivotal role with the bat, scoring a vital 18* in a late-innings support act to Ash Gardner, as Australia came from an ugly position to record a win against India.
In the second game, however, King was as dominant as ever, taking 4/8 against Barbados. And she could’ve had five and a hat-trick, but it wasn’t to be, as Meg Lanning put down the hat-trick ball off a fairly simple chance at slip.
The Hundred hat-trick ties it all off nicely though, an exclamation mark on her international form as she becomes a sought-after asset in the growing women’s domestic T20 market.
Aptly named, King has drawn obvious comparisons to the late Shane Warne, and has credited the Aussie GOAT as a predominant source of inspiration for her career.
With King’s hot start to her international career – and her career in competitions like the WBBL and The Hundred more broadly – it’s clear to see that she’s Australia’s newest leg spin star.
And it certainly wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we’ve got a new spin King – or Queen – on our hands.