Transitions are hard but inevitable in a team sport.
The Indian women’s cricket team has seen two pillars, Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami, retire from international cricket in the space of four months (Raj in June, Goswami at Lord’s last month). It’s possible that women’s cricket in India will never again see two such talents play off each other the way they did.
It’s now up to one woman to usher in a new era and ensure a smooth transition: 33-year-old Harmanpreet Kaur. “Jhulan’s approach to the team and to doing well in every game is something nobody can beat. And I don’t think anyone can fill Mithali’s place,” Kaur has said, of the two former captains.
But she has stared down challenges before. An aggressive right-handed batter who modelled her game on former India opener Virender Sehwag, Kaur grew up in Punjab’s Moga district, playing against boys at a time when there wasn’t a clear roadmap for women with cricketing dreams. Even then, she says, she knew that this was what she wanted to do with her life.
“I come from a very small village but I was always thinking about big things. I always wanted to lead my country,” she tells Wknd, speaking over the phone from Mumbai, where she now lives. “My family supported me.”
Her father Harmandar Singh Bhullar, a clerk with the Moga district court, has spoken of how many people in the neighbourhood told him he was wasting his time by “letting a girl play cricket” and how “I never cared about what others had to say.” Kaur made her ODI debut at 20, and played the World Cup that same year.
On the field, she is a fierce, fearless batter. In September, she played a starring role in the team’s ODI series win in England (their first there since 1999), scoring 221 runs in three innings (including a 143 off 111 balls, a new record for an Indian captain in women’s ODIs).
Kaur has been T20I captain since 2019, was given charge of the ODI team in June, and will most likely lead the Test team whenever India don the whites next. Her ambition as captain, she says, is for the team to play an aggressive brand of cricket.
“In the last three or four months, our approach has been a little different from what we were doing before. In the Sri Lanka series in June, our target was to score about 250 even on turning tracks. In England, we were looking to get past 300. We did both. The message is to play aggressively.”
The team is also looking to create depth, so that they are not dependent on only four or five batters. “In bowling, we are trying to create all-rounders,” Kaur says.
The early results look promising. The win against England was a 3-0 sweep. The team also won the Women’s T20 Asia Cup last week.
Her own role in these victories, in a time of increased scrutiny, has marked a dramatic resurgence after a nearly-five-year lull. Between 2017 and 2022, Kaur played 33 one-day matches without passing the three-figure mark once.
She expected better from herself, she says. But the fact that things were so dire for her gave her hope. “I told myself that things had already become bad; they couldn’t get worse. There are certain moments in life where you have to be stronger.”
The support she got from selectors and teammates gave her confidence. “You always need backing, regardless of how big a player you are,” she says.
Even the increased scrutiny is heartening, Kaur adds, because it’s a sign that people are watching. Kaur, Raj and Goswami have lived through decades of women’s cricket being ignored and invisible.
“I think we enjoy the pressure to perform. There is accountability. There was a time when we were not getting much support. Today we are getting it. We are making sure we make use of that. More than pressure, we feel proud that we are bringing people to the stadiums,” Kaur says.
She has a new set of big dreams now. “I want to win the World Cup. The next ICC ODI World Cup is in India (in 2025).”
The inaugural edition of the Women’s Indian Premier League (IPL) in March 2023 should help Kaur move closer to that target. “It will be a big platform for us. We’ve been waiting for this for many years. Domestic players will be able to share the dressing room with overseas players. If a domestic player gets that exposure, it will benefit the Indian team,” she says.
The team last made it to the final of an ODI World Cup in 2017. That remains Kaur’s golden moment: a breathtaking 171 off 115 balls against Australia in the semi-final at Derby. It was in that match that she stepped out of the shadows.
That was also the tournament that propelled women’s cricket into the limelight in India. TV viewership saw a five-time surge over the previous World Cup, with 156 million people tuning in across the country, 80 million of these from rural homes. The final alone was watched by 126 million people in India, according to data from the International Cricket Council (ICC). Raj recently described it as “the turning of a page in Indian women’s cricket”.
Goswami and Raj depended on Kaur then, as she will now depend on teammates such as Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma and Renuka Singh.
But Kaur knows the buck stops with her.
She says she loves that.
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