Grace Harris spent the summer in England peppering boundaries up and down the country in the T20 Blast and The Hundred. Ahead of her recall to Australia's ODI side for the upcoming World Cup, she spoke to Wisden Women's Cricket Weekly podcast about power-hitting, being a trailblazer, and why the 50-over format is her favourite.
Grace Harris has an innate knack of putting you at ease. She cracks jokes in every other sentence, is effortlessly funny and the broad grin she wears rarely slips. Her free-wheeling, go-lucky nature could be misinterpreted for laxity, especially when she skies one in her first three balls at the crease. But, over the course of half an hour of conversation, the inner steel which has made her one of the most sought after power-hitters in the world is visible.
“To generate the most amount of power, you have to have two feet planted on the ground, your head still and a good clean swing,” Harris tells the Wisden Women’s Cricket Weekly podcast. “For myself, a clean swing feels like I’m only swinging at 80 percent, so I’m not swinging my back out. I watch a lot of female players who try and do power-hitting and they all sit on the back foot or put all their momentum on the front foot, and by the time they make contact, they’re only hitting the ball on one leg.
“It’s physics. If there’s a moving object that’s coming at you that you can’t control, at a certain speed or a certain trajectory, you’ve got to figure out how you can best access to hit the ball out instead of up. You aim more for the horizon rather than the sky. I found it easy for maybe one or two shots in my life. Accessing over cover is a harder option for power-hitting – it requires a bit more technique to nail… You won’t feel any vibration in your hands from it hitting the toe or the stickers on your bat. You’ll hear a deep knocking sound from the middle of the bat. It sounds quite crisp and clean, and then it just feels good.”
“Stuff it, I’ll still hit it.”
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) October 22, 2023
Grace Harris, that is superb 😂 pic.twitter.com/o5kLrJ2BCQ
That feeling, an instant warm satisfaction of knowing a ball is destined to fly over the rope before anyone else in the ground realises it, is something Harris has experienced a lot this summer. Playing first for Surrey in the T20 Blast, she struck four sixes in a 35-ball 63 immediately after stepping off the plane from Australia. By the end of the competition, she was near the top group of the run charts, with no one in her vicinity having scored theirs at a higher strike rate, and she closed the competition with a final-winning half-century at a strike-rate of 190.
Crossing north of the river to Lord’s to play for London Spirit in The Hundred, she opened the competition with a brutal unbeaten 89 against Oval Invincibles, giving several of her Surrey teammates more reason to be grateful they’d not been on the receiving end of Harris’ blade in the county competition. She clubbed compatriot Amanda-Jade Wellington for six off the second ball she faced from her, and singled out Sophia Smale for similarly ballistic treatment.
The rest of the competition, however, did not go to plan. After a half-century against Manchester Originals a week after her innings at Lord’s, she only made it into double figures once more. Having been trialled as a floater in the middle order, either sent in to finish off an innings or change the dynamic of play, she was out for a two-ball duck opening in the Eliminator against Northern Superchargers.
“The floating role is more mentally draining from a concentration point of view,” says Harris. “Not so much what shots you’re going to play. You walk out and you play the same shots, it’s just whether there’s four out… If I’m being honest, opening the batting in T20s is the easiest. It’s the most free you get [to be].
“You learn four shots in your repertoire, you can drive over the ring, maybe a ramp shot or a scoop shot for a sticky wicket and you can score off most deliveries and probably go at a much higher run rate than a run a ball. You’re also coming in in the same scenario every time, so you can probably bat a lot more free.”
That conflict over how to use Harris’ game-changing potential is most obvious in her international record. She’s flitted between coming in during the powerplay to make best use of the fielding restrictions, and being sent in at the end to scythe a flurry of boundaries. Since making her debut in 2015, she’s batted in every position from 1-8 for Australia in T20Is, but most often has been used as a finisher. Her particular brand of six or out cricket amid a consistent world-beating batting lineup meant she didn’t find a regular place in the side until three years ago. But her unique abilities meant she was never far away from the selector’s eyes.
“I’m really grateful for the opportunities that I get in the teams, because I probably get a bit more leeway than others, given people say that I can ‘change the game,’” says Harris.
The stats back up that picture of Harris as a game-changing trailblazer. A decade ago Harris scored the first century in the WBBL, hitting 103 off 55 balls. Three years later, she broke her own record for the competition’s fastest hundred with a 42-ball effort, smashing 19 boundaries at the Gabba. As one of 14 players to have scored over 500 T20I runs for Australia, the closest of those in that group to her strike-rate (155.52), is Tahlia McGrath, who has so far scored her runs at 132.94. But, despite her astonishing record, Haris is still coming to terms with her status of a batter deserving of ‘trailblazer’ status in a side of Australia greats.
“I remember sitting in a room in state cricket, and the head coach said ‘if you don’t want to play for Australia, leave the room right now,’” says Harris. “That was his way of saying if you don’t want to improve or be a player who seeks constant improvement, if you’re happy just ticking a box and rolling along, then we don’t want you. But I remember sitting in that room and thinking, ‘damn, I have to play cricket for Australia to stay here? I just think it’s so fun’.
“I was probably not willing to speak up at that time in my career either, because I was 17 so I was quite young and brand new into the set up. So I thought, ‘well I’m working on stuff but I don’t think I’ll ever play cricket for Australia, I’ll just say that I want to’. So when I first got selected it was a bit like, ‘people who play for Australia are supposed to be really good, and I’m not’. I guess, first making it, I didn’t really think that I earned it, or that I deserved it, or that I should have been there, because there were a lot of good people that were playing, and a lot of people before me. I didn’t follow cricket growing up, so the legends of the game only more recently mean something to me.
“But as a trailblazer? No. I knew how I wanted to get out in the game. I know that sounds kind of dumb, but I want to live by the sword and die by the sword. If you’re going to stand by something then you have to get out doing it, you can’t just be all talk, and I didn’t want to be that athlete or that kind of person who says they’re really good at something but they don’t take that risk in a game, only in the nets.”
That do-or-die attitude means you can’t judge the impact Harris makes on stats alone. No one has been out more times without scoring for Australia in T20Is than Harris, and she’s only passed 50 in her national shirt once – an aspect of her record which partly indicates the fickleness of the role she’s played down the order. Of the 54 T20Is she’s played, she hasn’t been required to bat in more than a third of them.
Equally, breaking into Australia’s formidable ODI outfit has proven tricky. Since 2016, Harris has played two ODIs, and was required to bat in neither. Her average in the format is 3.00, and she has never played an innings which has reached double figures. Nevertheless, when Australia announced their squad to defend their crown in this year’s World Cup, Harris’ name was included. Setting aside her ODI record, it’s not hard to see why Australia would want an off-spinning all-rounder as an option to come into their lower order. But, at the time of speaking, before the squad was released, Harris was honest about where she viewed herself in the race for World Cup selection.
“I’m probably not in the best XI if I’m being completely honest,” she says. “Depending on conditions [I] could be in the XV I guess, if we’re going to the subcontinent with spin-friendly conditions. I’d bring the good vibes on the bench and make sure all the girls are really hydrated.
“But we’ve got Georgia Wareham, Alana King, Tahlia McGrath, we’ve got some pretty good players in the 50-over format… Sometimes I ask people when they say I should be playing 50-over, who are you dropping to pick me? Because there are only 11 spots. Somebody has to fall out and I bet they’ve got a pretty good record too.”
While her 50-over international record stands out as poor, Harris starred in the WNCL earlier this year, averaging 48.00 and hitting the third century of her List A career, a shot-a-minute 140 off 78 balls against Tasmania. The public image she holds as a T20 specialist is both at odds with innings of that caliber, and how she views the 50-over game.
“If I’m talking about pure batsman-, or batswomanship, then the 50-over format I love because you can take your time,” says Harris. “You can bat with less perceived pressure, I guess. The easy options are often the most acceptable, and in this [T20] format you have to go whether you feel like it or not, or whether you think it’s on or not. The one-day format, you get to hone your skills better and allow yourself to be a genuine batter. I think sometimes in this format [T20s] you can walk out and hit the ball and if you get out, ‘well we had to go anyway’.
“I’m often perceived as the player who has to have the highest strike rate, and someone else gets to wander on into the crease and nudge it off the hip and get a single. Sometimes you want to be able to do that and just be okay with it.”
It’s jarring to hear Harris, with her image and easy-going nature suddenly serious about dissecting the finer aspects of how she views herself as a cricketer. It’s also easy for her to hide behind the ‘good vibes’ and drink carrier role she’s marked out for herself. But underneath that cover is someone who does a specific role better than anyone else in the world. A trailblazer whether she believes it or not.
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