When Jemimah Rodrigues opened the doors to the press conference hall to address the media after India’s 58-run loss to New Zealand, something was different.
This isn’t the first loss she has been pushed forward to explain. This isn’t the first honest deep dive she is doing. But there was no obligatory smile, no pleasantries exchanged and no mercy in her self-assessment.
On paper, India was the favourite. New Zealand was coming into this match with the world underestimating the side after a 10-match losing streak this season before catching the flight to Dubai.
India was the flip side of that coin. Ten wins in 13 games this season, key batters striking form at the right time, a bowling unit that was looking good in both the pace and spin departments.
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So, one would understand why Jemimah didn’t bother mustering the strength to smile. In her own words, “Today would be the game they would like to forget.”
India’s performance broke down in all three departments. With the bat, an embarrassing collapse saw the side fall short of a 161-run target by 58 runs. This was enough to put India’s Net Run Rate (-2.900) on life support, despite this just being the side’s first game of the tournament.
When the team sheet arrived with six bowling options for India, one was tempted to ponder whether the extra bowler at the cost of an additional batting resource was worth it. But the Indian bowling attack, as a whole, looked like a deer in headlights. To India’s credit, the bowlers did deny the Kiwis a boundary for seven overs, but they cancelled that out by resigning to watch Sophie Devine wreak havoc towards the end.
Deepti Sharma conceded the second most runs of her T20I career in this game. Harmanpreet Kaur’s ‘strike bowler’ of choice leaked the most runs in this fixture, conceding 11.25 runs per over. Deepti was the collateral damage in Devine’s late rampage to plump up the New Zealand total.
The PowerPlay saw the problems in Indian fielding on full display. From Renuka Singh on one side to Shafali Verma and Smriti Mandhana on the other, plenty of singles were allowed to become twos. To make things worse, wicketkeeper Richa Ghosh, an otherwise safe pair of hands, dropped a sitter off the bowling of Arundhati Reddy to give Suzie Bates a lifeline.
A botched run out and the controversial umpiring that followed seemingly rattled India further. In the 14th over, Devine and Amelia Kerr tried to sneak in another run. Deepti had taken her cap from the umpire and the square-leg official – Jacqueline Williams – was down tying her shoe laces.
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Harmanpreet fielded the ball on the off-side and began walking in assuming the over was done when she saw the duo taking the second run. She threw the ball to keeper Richa who promptly ran Kerr out. The all-rounder didn’t bother waiting; she began walking back to the dugout only to have an official stop her and call her back.
She was adjudged not out and the ball was declared dead. (Here’s why). This left Harmanpreet on the field and Amol Muzumdar and his staff on the sidelines incensed as they each found an official and began making their case.
Murphy’s Law. It was a day when everything that could go wrong, went wrong.
A year in the making
When Devine won the toss and opted to bat first, eyebrows were predictably raised but from start to finish, from opponent to conditions, New Zealand had done its homework.
Bates and Georgia Plimmer’s 67-run stand for the opening wicket, which involved a fluent PowerPlay that set the tone for the innings, proved to be the game changer. Devine was quizzed about the Kiwis looking a bit weak up top and requiring firepower that could make a case for her returning to the opening slot.
“The cricket gods decided to be with us today and sometimes that’s all it is, isn’t it? There was a question around the batting order yesterday and trust me, we’ve been copping stuff from all over the place about the batting order and I hope today shows exactly why we’ve been sticking with it for the last 12, 18 months,” a happy Devine stated after the game.
“We believe in this batting order, we believe in the openers, we believe in Melie (Kerr), and we believe in myself and the rest of the group. So, hopefully that’s brought us a little bit of breathing space, but we know that it’s on us now to make sure that we back it up.”
The match was a jolt of electricity through the Indian dressing room’s veins. The build-up to the tournament has been positive for the Women in Blue. The messaging from players and the support staff exuded confidence.
“I can say that this is the best team we are going for a T20 World Cup with,” Harmanpreet had declared ahead of India’s departure for the World Cup.
New Zealand’s captain Sophie Devine celebrates her fifty. | Photo Credit: AP
That said, as has been the case many times in the past, it’s never a great sign when the biggest discussion even days before a tournament opener is laced with uncertainty about a key position in a team’s batting order. It’s not great if basic pillars like fielding are cracked and compromised.
“As far as fielding is concerned and then fitness, we have paid attention to each individual to take their fitness levels up a notch. So, I think we have put in that effort. The effort has been there. I think you’ll definitely see the results,” Muzumdar said on the eve of the game against New Zealand.
After a point, the coach was seen with his hand by his face, silently watching proceedings. There’s not much that could be said after a performance like that. The faces of the players wore the disappointment in a video uploaded by the Board.
Munish Bali, the fielding coach, handed Jemimah a medal for being the best fielder in the game. But it’s the harder questions and that gap between practice and match execution that need eagle-eyed scrutiny and accountability.
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The batting order shake-up is another issue to ponder over. Over the past year, India has auditioned several candidates for that number 3 spot, but the wheel eventually stopped at Harmanpreet. It was an experiment that didn’t work against New Zealand. Would it have helped India if the side had elevated the skipper earlier, when the team was playing internationals?
The audacity of the White Ferns was rooted in preparation, as Devine would reveal.
“Simple but effective,” she called their bowling performance. “Every bowler did their role perfectly well. Bowlers always get forgotten about, don’t they?”
Rosemary Mair, returning from a back injury, registered her career-best figures of four for 19. These are the best figures taken for New Zealand against India in women’s T20Is.
“She’s obviously had a tough run with injuries over the last couple of months and the work that she’s done behind closed doors to get herself in a position to play at this World Cup… We’ve all known the potential that she’s got as a bowler and tonight I thought she was outstanding. The way she attacked the stumps, her variations of pace, the clarity she had.. As a captain, that’s one of my favourite things when bowlers tell me exactly what they want, what they’re going to bowl and how they’re going to get batters out and I thought all my bowlers had that today.”
Devine revealed that their footwork against spin, accessing different areas of the ground to keep the scoring going and the effective bowling and field set-ups for India were a year in the making.
“To be honest, we’ve been planning for this game for about, I don’t know, probably close to a year. We’ve been really focused on this one game for a long time now and the level of detail that we’ve gone into in terms of match-ups, field sets… Obviously it helps having played a little bit with Smriti in the Women’s Premier League (WPL). But it’s all well and good to have plans. If the bowlers can’t execute it, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a pretty cool feeling to have plans be executed and then to be rewarded for it.”
A strategic long-off for Smriti, tricking Shafali with varying lines and lengths right at the start and a simple and effective chokehold in the middle-overs to pile on the scoreboard pressure helped the Kiwis soar under lights in Dubai, while India was reminded of the perils of flying too close to the sun.
India will do well to compartmentalise and put the horrors of its opener behind it as soon as possible. Back to the drawing board, the girls must go and fall back on that little boring thing called ‘process’.
It can be asphyxiating to think of just how much they’ll have to squeeze to make it to the knockouts, so it will have to be one block of action at a time.
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