Vlaeminck returns for Australia A’s India tour, two years after dislocating her shoulder at the T20 World Cup

Tayla Vlaeminck is going to India in September, which is a sentence Australian selectors have been trying to write for two years. The 27-year-old fast bowler has been named in Australia A’s squad for a multi-format women’s tour against India A, alongside Darcie Brown, another quick with time to make up.

Vlaeminck dislocated her shoulder in the opening over of Australia’s 2024 T20 World Cup campaign, and the injury kept recurring. She has not played an international or a domestic match since. The one exception was a Green v Gold red-ball trial in Sydney in April, her first cricket of any kind in about 18 months, where she had Katie Mack caught behind in her second over. Cricket Australia left her off the contract list in April after so long unavailable, though the selectors have said she comes back into the mix as soon as she can string games together.

Twenty-nine matches in eight years

That is the number that explains her career. Vlaeminck has played 29 times for Australia since her debut eight years ago, a return that has nothing to do with ability and everything to do with a body that keeps breaking down. Shoulder, foot, knee: the list is long. Her pace is the reason Australia keep waiting anyway.

Brown’s absence has a different cause. She was left out of the Australia squad that won the T20 World Cup in England in July, a selection call about conditions rather than form: the left-arm seamer Lucy Hamilton got the nod as a left-arm option among Australia’s otherwise right-arm quicks, in a squad that also carried four spinners.

Where they will and will not play

Both bowlers are in the squad for the white-ball half of the tour, three T20s in New Chandigarh and three 50-over games in Mohali. Neither will play the four-day match in Dharamshala, which reads like a workload decision for two bowlers coming back from long spells out.

Australia have handed the captaincy to three different players across the formats: Nicole Faltum takes the T20s, Tahlia Wilson the 50-over games and Rachel Trenaman the four-day match.

What Australia are saying

“It’s great to have Tayla back in the green and gold and to have Darcie back in action,” the national selector Shawn Flegler said, adding that both would give the younger players in the squad a chance to learn from two bowlers with international experience.

That younger group is the other half of the point. Sianna Ginger, Anika Learoyd, Lilly Mills and Frankie Nicklin are in a squad that also carries Charli Knott, Courtney Webb, Katie Mack, Tess Flintoff, Maitlan Brown and Hayley Silver-Holmes. This is the kind of squad Australia use to work out who comes next, and Indian conditions in September will ask questions of all of them.

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