And yet, even those who have played in the same team as Lanning admit to knowing little about her. The biggest revelation from a near-forensic trawl of the internet is that she doesn’t like eating coriander.
Watching Lanning in action paints a picture of an ice-cold winning machine. Automatic, unflappable and almost emotionless.
A conversation with her reveals the opposite. Lanning is likeable and modest, open enough to admit she is a “guarded” person who finds captaincy much more stressful than she makes it look.
She hates one nickname – ‘The Megastar’ – and laughs at another: ‘Serious Sally’.
“I don’t tend to open too much,” she says. “I’ve got a small circle of friends who I really trust and I go along with them rather than worrying too much about what’s happening on the outside.”
The fourth of five children, Lanning’s early cricket was with younger sister Anna, herself a good enough batter to play for Melbourne Stars. A narrow concrete path was their pitch, with a wall on one side and windows on the other encouraging them to play straight.
Lanning’s sporting ambition was actually to play hockey for Australia at the Olympics, with cricket only taking over around the age of 17. She made her first international hundred at 18 and was captain at 21, the youngest person to do either for an Australian cricket team.
Even now, in her ninth year as skipper and undisputed leader of a team that dominates women’s cricket, Lanning has to battle with her reserved nature.
“The biggest challenge that I have found, even today, is building relationships with everyone in the team and trying to understand how to best get the most out of people,” she says.
“It doesn’t come naturally to me.”
With an eye on life away from cricket, Lanning has completed a degree in health and exercise science. Because of the commitments of her day job, a three-year course took eight to finish.
In that time, Australia have not lost any of the three Ashes series in which Lanning has been in charge (she missed one through injury), and won three of the four T20 World Cups.
The last such instance, on home soil in 2020, came with the added pressure of trying to ‘Fill the ‘G’ – a push to sell out the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground for the final on International Women’s Day.
Australia eventually got there, memorably celebrating on stage with Katy Perry after getting their hands on the trophy in front of a crowd of 86,174, but not before almost being eliminated in the group stage.
“It was very stressful,” says Lanning. “I don’t think I’ve felt so nervous.
“It felt like people were saying ‘Australia is the best team, they’ll get there’, but that’s not how it works. We could have been out of the World Cup in two games, which would have been a disaster.
“We tried to talk it down as much as we could, but we felt it. There’s no doubt about that.”