Test cricket at Lord’s recently delivered everything fans yearn for: passion, pride, skill, and an unforgettable dose of chaos. As England and India clashed in the third Test, all eyes were on the fire of competition, but some hearts and voices couldn’t help but focus on those missing from the moment.
Alyssa Healy on the Lord’s Drama: Why Test Cricket Needs It’s Big Characters
On the Willow Talk podcast, Australian legend Alyssa Healy captured what so many were thinking but few said aloud: “It made me miss Virat Kohli at the Lord’s Test and in this Test series against England. He would have absolutely thrived in that situation and that hostile environment to save the Test match for India.”
Healy’s sentiment resonates deeply. In a match where tempers flew, and every action was amplified—Siraj’s send-offs, Stokes’ marathon spells, Jadeja’s stare-downs, Kohli’s absence was felt on every level. More than just a batter, Kohli is a force of nature who feeds off intensity. “He doesn’t shy away from the heat; he walks into it with a grin,” Healy pointed out. In the chaos of Lord’s, Kohli’s unyielding presence and ability to channel pressure into performance might have tilted the scales for India.
His retirement from Test cricket earlier this year left Indian fans, and, evidently, rivals across the world, wondering what could have been. As wickets tumbled around lone warrior Ravindra Jadeja’s unbeaten 61, the team seemed to lack not just a world-class batter, but an emotional anchor, the “heartbeat,” as Healy described Kohli’s presence.
Mitchell Starc: Dominance, Discipline, and the Drive that Inspires
While Healy’s podcast reflections honoured Kohli’s emotional impact, she was equally candid, albeit with a proud smile, about her husband Mitchell Starc’s herculean feats across the Caribbean.
The numbers from Sabina Park say it all: 20.3-7-41-7, Starc’s match haul in the third Test against the West Indies, including a devastating fourth-innings spell of 7.3-4-9-6. In a matter of minutes on the final morning, Starc decimated the West Indian lineup, engineering a collapse to 27 all out, the second-lowest total in Test history. Starc’s mastery wasn’t lost on Healy, who described him as “unplayable” and marvelled at the blend of rhythm, precision, and raw athleticism on show.
His efforts didn’t go unnoticed: Starc was named Player of the Match for his Sabina Park heroics and earned the Player of the Series award with 15 wickets in 6 innings and a handy 46 runs with the bat. He ended as the second-highest wicket-taker of the series and the leading wicket-taker for Australia. These performances powered Australia to a dominant 3-0 sweep against Roston Chase’s West Indies, a testament, as Healy reflected, to both team depth and the special qualities of individuals.
What Healy brings, uniquely, as a voice from the women’s game, is respect for these intangibles: grit, charisma, the ability to inspire in moments of panic or possibility. She sees, and celebrates, that these are not only the hallmarks of household names in men’s cricket but the pillars elevating women’s cricket to new heights as well.
As she summed up Australia’s demolition of the West Indies and dissected India’s heartbreak at Lord’s, Healy quietly issued a challenge to the next wave: Test cricket is not just about technical skill. It’s about owning the moment, whether you’re swinging the ball on a pink morning in Kingston or staring down the heat of Lord’s, crowd or no crowd.
And in this era, as in past ones, those who “run into the fire” Kohli, Starc, and the rising giants of the women’s game make this old format feel brand new.
