Australia great Jess Jonassen has revealed she "fell out of love" with international cricket after losing her place in the side last year and that she doesn’t view the decision to not renew her central contract as reflective of her performance in domestic competitions.
Speaking to the Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly podcast, Jonassen opened up on being omitted from Cricket Australia’s contract list earlier this year. The all-rounder has represented Australia 214 times across formats, and is their all-time leading wicket-taker in T20Is. Having made her debut in 2014, Jonassen hasn’t represented Australia since 2023, with Ash Gardner, Alana King, Georgia Wareham and Sophie Molineux preferred ahead of her as spinners.
“I fell out of love with it [international cricket], a little bit over the last few years,” Jonassen said. “There were a few certain ways I was starting to feel, and I thought my performances were still warranting, not necessarily selections in final squads, but to at least travel and be contracted. To be told that it wasn’t ate away at me a little bit.
“Now, if they called I’d like to think I’d still put my hand up, I still want to represent my country but, equally, I’ve really enjoyed the fact that I’ve been fully invested and fully engrossed in my domestic programme back home, and being able to still have the opportunity to travel the world and play franchise cricket in some teams that see some value in me still, even though I haven’t played international cricket in a little while.”
Jonassen was named Player of the Tournament in this year’s WBBL, taking 17 wickets and averaging 43.60 with the bat. She was also the third-highest wicket-taker in the 2025 WPL, the second edition running she’s been in the top five, and took figures of 4-10 in The Hundred earlier this week.
“It’s always hard when there are people outside the walls and the team that see it [my domestic performances], but the only people I want to [see them] are the people who are involved in making the decisions around selection,” said Jonassen. “I’ve been fortunate enough to have over 200 [international caps], and I’d love to keep adding to it but the reality is it probably won’t happen anymore just with who’s in there. I got a player of the tournament in our domestic competition last year and I then found myself de-listed. For me, it wasn’t necessarily a form thing.”
Speaking last year after Jonassen was left out of Australia’s T20 World Cup squad, Alyssa Healy said the door was still “wide open” for the all-rounder to return to the national squad. That sentiment was echoed by Australia national selector Shawn Flegler when Jonassen was left off the CA central contracts list earlier this year.
'Comment on my performance, sure, but everything else should be off limits'
In a wide-ranging interview, Jonassen also opened up on her experience of receiving online abuse during the ongoing Hundred competition. “I cop so much, even within this season of The Hundred, there have been a number of players, myself included, who have been receiving some really terrible things online,” said Jonassen. “You can say it doesn’t impact you as much as you want but, it will always plant some seed of doubt in there. Or at least get you talking about it and not focussing on the things that actually matter… There has been a lot of education around some people’s reasoning for writing some bad things. Quite often it’s that they’ve lost money on your game that you never asked them to place in the first place.
“There are comments not even on recent posts. Sometimes it’s comments on a photo of my wife and I, and we got married two years ago. So people have actively gone back into your feed to post something horrific that family members and friends can see if I don’t quite get there in time to either report or delete it.”
In last year’s women’s T20 World Cup, the ICC trialled an AI tool for eliminating social media abuse directed towards players. It analysed almost half a million social media comments across 60 player and eight team accounts to remove those which included racism, sexism and homophobia. Almost a fifth of those comments were either deemed as harmful, or generated by bots.
“Comment on my performance, sure, but everything else should be off limits,” said Jonassen. “Sometimes all it takes is that one comment or one message that could tip someone over the edge.”
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