Champion cricketer Ellyse Perry is no longer considered an automatic pick for Australia’s Twenty20 team

“It’s a good question,” said selection chair Shawn Flegler last week.

For so long it would have been an unthinkable question. Ellyse Perry dropped? Next thing you’ll tell me we’re about to deport the world No.1 tennis player. Oh, wait.

But the Perry elephant in the room is real, and has been real for quite some time.

Think back to early March 2020. That week or two before the world collapsed before our eyes. Monday, March 2, 2020. Junction Oval, St Kilda. Australia v New Zealand in the sides’ final pool game of the Twenty20 World Cup.

Perry had been under an injury cloud even before the game. There were extra eyes on the nets that day, across the road from the Albert Park track where the Grand Prix was supposed to be held the following week. Spoiler alert: it was not.

Perry got through that fitness test, but calamity would strike during New Zealand’s run chase as Australia’s generation-defining sportswoman tore her hamstring off the bone while fielding. The hosts snuck through to the semis, but their run to the title would have to come without Perry.

That Australia narrowly survived being eliminated by the Sydney rain the following Thursday night is a story in and of itself, while the final against India will forever be remembered as both a game-changing night for Australian sport and an incredible stroke of good timing given the Grand Prix was cancelled five days later and Australia was locked down by the end of the month.

But by stealth, it conditioned Australia to the idea they could win without Perry.

Then, the big break. Australia’s women didn’t play any international cricket for months, and had a home series against India put back by a summer.

The first question was if and when Perry would get back. Whether she would get picked seemed too absurd to even ponder.

But her T20 batting has been modest since her return. In internationals the sample size is small, just four innings, two not outs, an average of 17.50 with a strike rate of 106.06.

It is Perry’s Women’s Big Bash League form which is much more concerning. In 2020 she made 390 runs, last year it was 358. The aggregates are more than fine. How slowly she has made those runs is not. A strike rate of 96.53 in 2020 and 91.32 the following year.

And increasingly it appears as though she is surplus to needs with the ball too, at least in T20 internationals. Perry has sent down just four overs in her six T20Is since the injury.

The issue is about to come to a head. Rachael Haynes is about to return from injury to bolster the middle order, while Tahlia McGrath, a seaming all-rounder like Perry, but five years her junior, was Player of the Series against India at the start of the season.

It would be foolish to write off a champion just yet. And Perry is a champion, a future legend really.

But the game has evolved enormously since she made her debut in 2007, almost half a lifetime ago in Perry’s case.

Her longtime teammate and Australian captain Meg Lanning has challenged Perry to keep improving in a bid to ward off redundancy.

“I think it’s just her ability with the bat to really dominate attacks, and be able to accelerate towards the back end of some innings. I think she’s got the skills and power to be able to do that a little bit earlier, pick certain bowlers where she can just really get on top of them and change the momentum of the game,” Lanning said.

“I think she’s got it all in there, it’s just perhaps about pulling the trigger a little bit earlier and put the pressure back on the bowlers. That’s something as batters we all try to do. As a batting unit we talk about doing that. I think Ellyse could certainly take attacks apart when she decides to pull that trigger.

“She’s certainly a very competitive person and wants to do well as often as she can. I think she’s spoken openly about evolving her game and adding some different things to keep up with the way it’s moving.

“T20 cricket in particular has changed a lot over the last two or three years. Every player is talking about how they can improve and get better. Ellyse is in that same boat, in every format over a long period of time she’s shown she can deliver in really big moments. She’s a really consistent performer. I have no doubt she is thinking how she can keep getting better to keep impacting every game she plays, whether that’s T20 or Test or ODIs.”

As Lanning noted, when she first started playing domestic cricket, 180 was considered a strong 50-over score. Those days are long gone. Can Perry keep up?

Perry’s skill set remains suited to one-day and Test cricket. And if Lanning gets her wish and the top Aussie women start playing a lot more red-ball cricket, giving Perry some rest by using her sparingly in T20s might not be the worst idea.

But with a huge year beckoning for the team: Ashes into 50-over World Cup into Commonwealth Games, the days of Perry as an automatic selection seem over.