Updated August 2026 · 9 min read
Women's cricket has exploded in visibility over the last decade — full-time professional contracts, sold-out World Cup finals, and franchise leagues like the WBBL and WPL have turned it into a genuinely global sport. That growth has also sharpened one long-running question: who is the greatest female cricketer of all time?
Unlike some GOAT debates, this one has a real complication built in: the women's game has changed shape dramatically even within living memory. Players from the 1990s and 2000s competed with far less funding, fewer matches, minimal television coverage, and shorter international calendars than today's professionals. That makes cross-era comparison even trickier than in the men's game. Rather than force a single verdict, this article lays out the strongest, most credible candidates and the evidence behind each.
Before naming names, it's worth naming the obstacles specific to women's cricket history:
If there's a consensus modern pick, it's Ellyse Perry. The Australian all-rounder became the first athlete from Australia to represent her country in both the cricket and football World Cups, and by her mid-20s was already being discussed in the same breath as the format's greatest names. In 2019, former England captain Charlotte Edwards publicly called Perry "the greatest female player we're ever going to see."
The statistical case is unusually strong for an all-rounder. Perry's unbeaten 213 against England in a 2017 Ashes Test was the third-highest score in women's Test history and remains the highest score by an Australian woman in a Test match, lifting her Test batting average to 61.71 — the third-highest in the history of the women's game. With the ball, her Test bowling average of 16.76 ranks 12th all-time, making her one of only two players in the recorded history of men's or women's cricket to sit inside the top 15 in both career batting and bowling averages — the other being England's Enid Bakewell in the 1970s.
Her volume across formats backs this up. Perry became the first woman in international cricket to complete the double of 5,000 runs and 300 wickets, reaching the milestone during a 2021 pink-ball Test against India, with 3,135 ODI runs and 152 ODI wickets plus 1,243 T20I runs and 115 T20I wickets to her name at that point. She has also won the ICC's annual women's cricketer of the year award twice and, during 2019 alone, became the first player of either gender to reach 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in T20I cricket. In 2020, she was voted the ICC Women's ODI Cricketer of the Decade, edging out India's Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami after a period return of 2,621 runs and 98 wickets across 73 ODIs at a batting average of 68.97.
Skeptics note that Perry's case leans heavily on being an all-rounder measured across two skills rather than dominating one outright category the way a specialist batter or bowler might. Her career has also unfolded almost entirely within the professional era, which some argue makes direct comparison to earlier greats who played with far less support somewhat unfair in the other direction.
For pure batting longevity and volume, few can match India's Mithali Raj. Across an international career from 1999 to 2022, Raj captained India's national team from 2004 to 2022 and became the highest run-scorer in women's international cricket history, a record ESPN has cited in ranking her among the greatest female cricketers of all time. She is the only female cricketer to pass 7,000 runs in Women's ODIs, the first player to score seven consecutive ODI half-centuries, and the holder of the record for most half-centuries in Women's ODI history.
Raj was named Wisden's Leading Woman Cricketer in the World in 2017 and received India's Arjuna Award, Padma Shri, and Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna — among the country's highest sporting honours. She also remains the only female player to have captained India in more than one ICC ODI World Cup final, doing so in 2005 and 2017.
Raj's case is built almost entirely on batting, without the multi-skill impact that all-rounders like Perry bring. Her strike rate, particularly in the T20 format, has also drawn criticism from analysts who feel her batting approach didn't evolve as quickly as the format did in her later career.
As Australia's most successful captain across formats, Meg Lanning led her team to multiple World Cup titles and built one of the most dominant win records in the sport's history, with a top-order batting average that remains among the best of any modern player.
A pioneer of the professional era's foundations, Belinda Clark was the first cricketer of any gender to score a double-century in a One Day International, a record that stood untouched by any player, male or female, for well over a decade.
England's long-serving captain redefined what a modern batting career in the women's game could look like, playing internationally for two decades and later transitioning into one of the sport's most respected coaching voices — the same voice that named Perry the game's greatest.
Widely considered the greatest fast bowler the women's game has produced, Jhulan Goswami retired as the format's all-time leading wicket-taker across Women's ODIs, a record built over more than 20 years of international cricket for India.
Australia's Alyssa Healy and India's Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur are increasingly part of this conversation, with Kaur captaining India to its first-ever Women's World Cup title in 2025. None has yet matched the sustained, multi-format dominance of Perry or the pure run-scoring longevity of Raj, but the next chapter of this debate is still being written by the current generation.
| Player | Format focus | Signature record | Strongest argument |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ellyse Perry | All-rounder, all formats | 5,000 runs & 300 wickets double; Test avg 61.71 | Best combined bat-and-ball impact of any player, either gender |
| Mithali Raj | Test & ODI batting | Highest run-scorer in women's internationals | Unmatched batting longevity and volume |
| Meg Lanning | ODI & T20 captaincy | Multiple World Cup titles as captain | Most successful leader in the modern game |
| Belinda Clark | ODI batting | First-ever ODI double-century (any gender) | Trailblazer whose record outlasted the men's game |
| Jhulan Goswami | Bowling | All-time leading ODI wicket-taker | Greatest fast bowler in the women's game |
If the question is "greatest combined bat-and-ball impact across the professional era," Ellyse Perry's case is close to a consensus pick among current players and pundits, backed by statistics few all-rounders in either gender's game have matched. If the question is "greatest pure batting career, judged on volume and longevity," Mithali Raj's record run tally and two-decade international career are hard to overlook. If the question centers on leadership and trophies, Meg Lanning's case stands apart.
What most observers agree on is that the debate itself is a sign of how far the women's game has come: a decade ago, there wasn't enough televised, statistically rich cricket to have this conversation with real depth. Today there is — and as the current generation adds to its own résumé, this list is far from finished.
She's widely regarded as the strongest current candidate given her rare combination of elite batting and bowling numbers across all three formats, and multiple former players have named her as such. But it isn't a unanimous verdict — batting-only and bowling-only greats have equally strong, differently-shaped cases.
Raj's case rests on longevity and volume rather than tempo: she is the format's all-time leading run-scorer in Women's ODIs and played international cricket across three different decades, a record that speaks to consistency more than explosiveness.
Leagues like the WBBL and WPL have given fans far more regular access to top players, boosting the profile of current stars. But most all-time rankings still weight Test and ODI performance heavily, since that's where the largest body of historical, comparable data exists.
Opinions vary, but Ellyse Perry has received some of the strongest individual endorsements, including from former England captain Charlotte Edwards, while Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami are frequently cited by Indian and subcontinental pundits as the standard-bearers of an earlier era.