Australia A Women

Alyssa Healy's name on an Australia A team sheet tells you what the side is for: a place where a senior international still turns out between assignments, alongside players pushing to get near the first team at all. Tahlia McGrath captained the group in 2025, by which point the development squad Cricket Australia set up in 2018 had become a regular fixture on the calendar rather than an occasional experiment.

The first matches came that October, in India, where Australia A swept a three-match One-Day International series against India A. A T20I series followed in Australia in December the following year, won by the same 3-0 scoreline. Nothing about the side stayed fixed after that beginning — not the opposition, not the ground. Fixtures have taken the squad to the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, to Hurstville Oval in Sydney, to Loughborough in England, wherever the next series happens to sit. Training runs through the Bupa National Cricket Centre in Brisbane instead.

There is no ICC-sanctioned A-level trophy in the cabinet — that honour belongs elsewhere, to India A's win in the only edition of the Women's A Championship — but bilateral cricket has gone Australia A's way often enough to matter for the players it is meant to develop. The 2025 season alone brought a 3-0 ODI sweep and a 3-0 T20I sweep against India A, a series win and a Test victory over England A, following a Test win against India A the previous season. Mel Jones represented the side back in 2000, a reminder that the pathway predates its own official founding by nearly two decades under a different guise.