The worrying factors for the Women in Blue

The Indian Women’s cricket team’s recent failures in the Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup have raised some serious questions and got the tongues wagging on their title credentials. 

Having lost the Asia Cup final in July, 2024 followed by their failure to make it to the knockouts of the recently concluded T20 World Cup hasn’t been lost on the cricket fans in the country who have been critical of the team’s performances in the ICC Tournaments. For the record, India has never won an ODI or T20 WC, bowing out in the group stage four times, losing in the Semis – four times and only reaching the final in the 2020 edition which they lost to Australia. For a nation where cricket is treated with absolute reverence and no excuses of proper support and infrastructure, that is an abysmal record. 

The intention behind the Women’s Indian Premier League (WIPL) was to provide the Indian women’s team an exceptional platform to play alongside top players from other teams, learn to perform under pressure and also discover potential talent. While some of the boxes may have been ticked, the main purpose of making them title contenders hasn’t been achieved yet. 

Here we look at the worrying causes that have been noticed in their performances off-late in the ICC Tournaments – 

Over-reliance on the Opening Batters 

India’s top order boasts of one of the best batters in Women’s Cricket with Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, Harmanpreet Kaur, Deepti Sharma and Jemimah Rodrigues but the team relies heavily on the opening partnership of Mandhana and Verma. It’s been fairly evident that if either or both of them fail, the other batters barely manage to get the team out of trouble. In this World Cup too, the two games India won, it needed a strong opening partnership to get them to a decent total or chase the required runs. It’s high time the middle and lower order take more responsibility and that too when one or both of the openers fail. 

Lack of match-winning spin bowling options 

The top women’s team like Australia and England don’t rely primarily on fast bowlers but on their spinners as well to change the games in the middle overs but India hasn’t been able to do so.

India has been renowned for producing world class spinners in the men’s game. The current spin trio of Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Kuldeep Yadav are feared by opposition batsmen not just in the sub-continent but also world over. However, the same cannot be said about the women’s team which has been playing with Deepti Sharma, Shreyanka Patil and Asha Shobhana in recent years. Deepti Sharma is a seasoned campaigner but she has been really inconsistent, Shreyanka Patil is inexperienced and Asha Shobana has been a late bloomer with lack of exposure to international cricket. With Deepti’s decline with age, it was quite evident during the World Cup that India couldn’t control the game in the middle overs, leaking too many runs in most games and conceding an above-par total that too on the spin-friendly tracks in Dubai and Sharjah. 

Lack of Genuine All-round options in the Squad 

If we take a look at all the top women teams like England, Australia, New Zealand and even South Africa, they all have world-class genuine all-rounders like Ash Gardner, Tahlia McGrath, Nat-Sciver Brunt, Marizanne Kapp and Amelia Kerr to name a few. The only genuine all-rounders India has in the shorter format are Deepti Sharma and Pooja Vastrakar out of which Deepti is in a decline due to age and Vastrakar is too injury-prone and inconsistent with both the bat and ball. India does need at least two or three genuine allrounders to transform from challengers to winners.

Inability to handle pressure in big games  

If we look at the Indian team’s performance in bilateral series over the past year, they have done exceedingly well but when it comes to the ICC Tournaments, even though most of the players are experienced, they just wilt under pressure. While it’s understandable that they have humongous pressure from the Indian fans’ expectations but that also means they can leverage the support of the fans and perform better. 

However, they have often succumbed to pressure in knock-outs and finals with the exception of captain Harmanpreet Kaur who has waged a lone battle many times. If the Women in Blue want to beat the highly competent sides on a regular basis, then they need to up their mental game as well. At this point of time, it doesn’t look like they have a strong mentality and can comeback to win games from difficult situations.