Boria Majumdar’s column: Women’s cricket team will now have to find a way forward

The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup is going to be semi-final, but India is not in the last four. This will definitely be disappointing for the fans. But the truth is that based on the way our team performed in the last two weeks, it did not deserve to get there. The team could not play unitedly. There were one or two notable individual efforts, but the team performance was not visible. This mattered heavily in the matches played against Australia and South Africa. If we start with captain Harmanpreet Kaur, she played a brilliant innings against Australia. She was in her best form and it was because of her innings that India remained in the competition. But in all the other matches she appeared more cautious than necessary. If he had played a similar innings against South Africa, India could have won that match and reached the semi-finals. It is this same lack of consistency that is hurting the team. Smriti Mandhana did not play a big role despite getting good starts in the important matches against South Africa and Australia. The truth is that these were the only two matches that mattered, as the rest of the matches were against relatively weak teams. In such a situation, when your best player is not able to make a big contribution, then it is definitely a problem. The entire tournament was bad for Jemimah Rodriguez and Yastika Bhatia and Jemimah should take some time to introspect as to where the problem lies. She has talent, but she herself will admit that she has not performed up to her potential in her career so far. Barring innings like the century she scored against Australia in the 2025 World Cup semi-finals, she has not been able to perform consistently. Deepti Sharma did not make much of an impact after taking five wickets against Pakistan and her World Cup remained lackluster despite taking her 356th wicket in international cricket in the match against Australia. Richa also could not do anything special after a good match. Apart from Charani, no one else came forward in bowling when the team needed it most. Fielding was below average throughout the tournament and even one of the best players, Radha Yadav, dropped many catches. Now what is the way forward? The next stop is the Asian Games and with no major competition at the Asian level, India can easily win the gold medal. But the tournament that should be in focus is the Champions Trophy to be held in Sri Lanka in February 2027. Can coach Amol Majumdar take some tough decisions and adapt the team to T20? It is not good to be out of the group stage in 2024 and 2026 and with the Olympics after two years, India needs new ideas. The coming few months will be very important for Amol as to what direction he takes the team. Although injuries affect the team, you have to have backup players ready and develop new players. When we have so much talent and resources, it’s natural that expectations will be high. Amol will also have to think about his strategy. Why didn’t they retire Jamie against Australia and why didn’t they send Richa in first? Why was the position of number 3 kept changing? Although left-right combination may be the only possible reason for this, is it not also true that number 3 is a special role and any player needs a long time to settle into it? Why was Prema Rawat left out after 2 overs in bowling? We are ending the World Cup with so many questions and the need of the hour is to find some answers and implement solutions. (These are the author’s own views)

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