New dawn of Indian women’s cricket

Imagine the Chicago Bulls without Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippin. Imagine Formula One without Michael Schumacher and Mika Hakkinen. Imagine a South Africa cricket team without AB de Villiers and Faf du Plessis.

You don’t need to imagine. All of these things came to pass, and signalled the end of an era for that sport. Now, look at the Women’s T20 Challenge squads, which feature neither Mithali Raj nor Jhulan Goswami, and you know you are staring at the end of another era.

Goswami retired from the T20 format in 2018. Raj did so in 2019. Yet both players were a part of the previous edition of the Women’s T20 Challenge, held in 2020. Since their international debuts, Raj in 1999 and Goswami in 2002, both have shaped every major milestone in women’s cricket in India, bookended by two World Cup finals in 2005 and 2017. But as India plays (what is hopefully) the final edition of these exhibition matches without them, their absence is significant.

At the same time, not conspicuous. Because a new generation of players are announcing themselves in Pune.

Every match in this Women’s T20 Challenge has broken records. In the first game, a score above 160 was posted for the first time. In the second, a target above 150 was chased for the first time, and in the third, a record 364 runs were scored. But then this was expected. The standard of women’s cricket in India, even without Raj and Goswami, is too high to fit into just three teams with four overseas players each. It is like unleashing a tornado in a small library and then being surprised at the mess. Just last December, a high-quality fourteam Challenger Trophy was played, without nine of India’s top players.

Have a look at the scorecard of the match that saw 364 runs scored: Smriti Mandhana’s Trailblazers scored 190/5, with Mandhana contributing only 1. Sabbineni Meghana, from the small city of Mulapadu, Vijayawada scored 73 off 47. Velocity fell short of the total, but denied Trailblazers a place in the final on NRR (net run rate) thanks to a stunning innings from Kiran Navgire. She put her hometown of Mire, Solapur (and women’s cricket) on the map, with 69 off 34 balls in her first high-profile tournament. She hit five sixes on the way, including her first ball. If you haven’t seen the highlights of this game, watch them now.

While Meghana is a known quantity, the powerful Navgire has never before played even a Challenger Trophy. The 26-year old’s story is worth repeating here. Playing javelin, shot put and the 100 metres as a teen, she took up cricket late, after a chance encounter with a coach who offered her a scholarship in Pune. Already a strong athlete, and unable to hold down a place in the Maharashtra XI, she shifted to Nagaland. There she slammed the door down with 525 runs in seven T20s this year, hitting 35 sixes, 20 more than Shafali who was next best. Any concerns of those runs coming against inferior bowling in the Plate Group were allayed by her showing in Pune.

Her power-hitting is likely to see her fast tracked into the Indian team soon, and will probably earn her a payday whenever a Women’s IPL does come around. A colleague in the media who covers Olympic sport jokes that a Women’s IPL will kill other women’s sports because every talented female athlete will choose cricket and the monetary rewards on offer. This is an exaggeration of course, but a Women’s IPL will inevitably attract top female athletic talent into women’s cricket, where the competition is thinner than in men’s cricket but the rewards at the top are more significant than in other sports.

Which brings us back to Raj and Goswami, who played most of their cricket for scant financial reward. These two have been among Indian cricket’s finest servants, male or female. For them and theirs, financial security came only through government jobs, not IPL contracts. They deserved to be the ones heralding in this new era, playing in a Women’s IPL, which should have been the next logical step after India’s heroic run to the final of the 2017 World Cup. Instead we still have exhibition games, which are showing off how much talent India has even without Raj and Goswami. Women’s cricket in India first moved too slow for them, and then quickly past them.

Virar Centre clinched the 30th Kalpesh Koli Memorial tournament title after beating Bandra Centre in the final by virtue of first innings lead.

Brief scores: Virar Centre 167 & 172 in 58.1 overs (Ayush Maru 52; Ajit Kumar 4/27) beat

67 & 102/6 (Anant Desai 48) on first innings lead.

U-19 Manohar Sawant tournament brief scores: Air India, Kalina 259/7 in 44 overs (Hussain Shaikh 102) beat

in 44.2 overs (Divyam Shah 54; Tanay Khandeshi 6/26) by 44 runs,

124 in 29.3 overs (Aaryan Dalal 3/27) lost to

125/8 in 38.2 overs (Aman Tiwari 4/28,