FEATURES
Follow UsJust four defeats in the last two years or so tell a story with a conclusion as obvious as the morning sun in the east.
Australia is a champion team, and champions are never down for long. They neither repeat their mistakes nor allow the opposition to attack them in a similar fashion.
Kim Garth, the former Ireland cricketer who made a swift move to Australia, was the only new inclusion in Alyssa Healy’s team after their rare loss against India in the first T20I.
The Aussies were guilty of being wayward in the last game, and they immediately dropped the culprit - Darcie Brown, who gave away 14 extras in her first over. Courtesy of that, India scored 59/0 in their first six overs, allowing themselves to chase 142 with ease.
In the second T20I, the first six overs of the Indian innings were again in focus, but the reasons couldn’t be more different this time.
Batting first, the Indian batters failed to create an upbeat tempo for the innings, unlike the last game. The Australian pacers Megan Schutt and Kim Garth started off on a length and kept the ball close to the stumps. Garth, in particular, troubled Shafali Verma with her swing and movement from the pitch. Verma couldn’t survive that for long and succumbed to a ball that moved a bit and pinned her pads in front of the stumps.
Like Titas Sadhu from the last game, Garth too focused to bowl on a length, and that bore instant results for her. In fact, whenever Garth moved away from a good length, she leaked runs. That plan helped Garth force Jemimah Rodrigues to edge one to the keeper. The key again was that hard length and fourth stump line, which didn’t allow Rodrigues to manoeuvre the ball, and all she could manage was a faint edge.
India rely immensely on their openers, Shafali and Smriti Mandhana, for quick starts, which further ables the middle order to continue the momentum. With the lack of consistent power-hitting options at number six and seven in the batting order, having a good start and a solid middle-over phase is crucial for putting a big total on the board.
Kim Garth’s two key wickets in the first six overs for just 16 runs in three overs threw that plan into the doldrums.
As soon as two wickets fell, Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur had to curb their attacking instincts and focus on consolidating the innings, which threatened to wither away soon. What happened was that at the end of the seventh over, Indians had scored only 36. Dot ball pressure was piling up. Something was gonna give soon, and soon it did.
By the 11th over, India had lost Mandhana and Kaur and only 69 runs were scored. Harmanpreet’s failure to score in T20Is at home since 2023 (where she averages only 15.7 in four innings) threw India’s innings into a deep rut. There was simply too much left to do for Richa Ghosh at the end.
Amidst all these issues exposed by the early powerplay wickets, it was clear that the Indian team has been playing too many anchors in their batting order. Over-reliance on the openers is bound to happen whenever Harmanpreet is out of form. Moreover, playing Deepti Sharma as the finisher in the batting order despite having Pooja Vastrakar and Shreyanka Patil (who play with much more intent) shows a lack of strategic inventiveness from Amol Muzumdar and his team.
Despite starting the series on a high, the Indians now have to play a decider because their batting woes were exposed after two early wickets courtesy of Player of the Match Kim Garth. Indian fans would only hope that the Indian batting order won’t repeat the same errors again on a track that didn’t have any demons.
The best thing is they only need to look towards the dugout beside them and figure out how to pull that off.
