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Follow UsThere’s this scene from the movie ‘83’, which is etched in my mind.
In a press conference before the 1983 Cricket World Cup, a journalist asks the Indian men’s skipper Kapil Dev in jest if they are in England to win the cup. Kapil replies with the most carefully enunciated sentence I’ve heard an Indian cricketer speak.
“What else we here for?”
41 years later, I’m not sure if anyone who has watched the Indian women play in the first two ODIs of the three-match ODI series can say the same thing about them.
It’s one thing to lose. It’s even acceptable not to be able to compete against a much superior side. However, looking listless for two games in a row is unacceptable with both the bat and the ball. It was almost as if the Indian women were playing cricket in coloured clothes but with a white flag.
Phoebe Litchfield and Georgia Voll are probably the most dangerous-looking 21-year-old batters in women’s cricket at the moment. They showed that once again today at the Allan Border Field in Brisbane, every team in the world should be scared of what they both can do.
Voll, especially, looked absolutely invincible until she brought up her century and was dismissed right after. It’s one thing to have her power. But it’s another to marry it with a really solid technique and play with 90% control, scoring half of your runs in boundaries. The youngster really made the real estate between extra cover and mid-wicket her home, scoring 11 out of her 12 fours in that region.
So what did the Indian bowlers do while she was batting merrily? Did skipper Harmanpreet Kaur make it hard for her to access those areas with her field changes?
To answer it simply, nothing constructive was done. Overs kept passing, Litchfield and Voll brought up the 100 for their team in almost a run-a-ball and collected 130 runs in 116 balls together. Indians were waiting for a mistake to happen, which only happened because Litchfield kept charging the bowler to score runs.
Meanwhile, Indians had already shot themselves in the foot by playing with just two pacers on a pitch where batting was easier than driving an automatic transmission car on an empty road. Change of pace, use of bouncers, subtle changes in the seam position — all these things that you see regularly from the Australian pacers, were barely tried by the Indians. Saima Thakor did it occasionally, but Renuka Singh Thakur isn’t made to bowl bouncers. Asking her to do that job would also be quite unfair.
Meanwhile, Ellyse Perry arrived after Litchfield's departure and batted as if she were ageing in reverse. While it's common for batters to slow down with age, Perry has gotten faster, stronger, and mightier. She smashed six sixes in her innings — the most by an Australian batter in ODIs.
She targeted the Indian spinners Deepti Sharma, Minnu Mani, and Priya Mishra, scoring 87 runs in just 53 deliveries against them. She slog-swept and hit them straight in the V often, as she used her feet to great effect in the game — something Indian batters still failed to do except Jemimah Rodrigues in the second ODI. In the process, Perry brought up her century in just 72 deliveries, the fastest against India in ODI history.
You can judge for yourself how hapless India must have been when Beth Mooney arrived at the score of 222/2 in 32.2 overs. Their pulverisation was ending. Their mentally zoned-out captain was all hands, sending fielders here and there like ants scurrying behind crumbs of food. But even the crumbs weren’t in India’s fortune as Mooney also piled on their misery with a 56 off just 44 deliveries.
The Australian run rate, which was near six in the 10th over, kept climbing higher and didn’t drop below it for the entirety of their innings. Meanwhile, India’s run rate, in comparison, despite them chasing 372, hardly ever crossed the run-a-ball mark in their innings. According to our smart stats tool, Criclytics, Australia’s win % never dropped below 90 after the 5th over of their batting innings. That was the level of dominance the home side had over the visitors in this game.
When India’s batting arrived, they opened with Richa Ghosh, as Priya Punia never came in to bat (there were no clarifications on her as well). While Ghosh was able to get the boundaries, she was yet again stuck at the crease and unable to rotate the strike.
What began then was a case of the occasional boundary being hit, which kept India’s run rate around the 5 runs/over mark, but they were hardly ever in the chase. Australia’s ground fielding was top-notch, as yet again, singles and doubles were hard to come by. That should have shown a big mirror to the Indians, who were largely indifferent in the field, reflecting their numb state in the game all throughout.
It was almost as if India were always waiting for an imminent defeat after shoddy selections and an insipid display of cricket on the field. They played just two pacers, none of whom had much experience bowling at the death. They had a tall pace bowling all-rounder on the bench and probably their best experienced and defensive fast bowler (Shikha Pandey) back home in India.
At this point, there are only piercing questions and no definite answers. While the Indian skipper continued to clutch on to the barely present positives even after such a loss, one can only wonder if the team asked themselves the same question the journalist asked Kapil Dev 41 years ago.
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