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Follow UsAhhhhhhhhh s#!t here we go again!
First match of an away series. You had already sent an A tour in August 2024 to the same place. You prepare rigorously in a camp for it. And then, when D-day arrives, you win the toss in sunny Brisbane.
Life’s good. You want to sing songs of love, of joy, of ecstasy.
That’s when destiny arrives and insinuates horror in your life. The sky doesn’t feel sunny anymore. The sun is just a mirage. It’s all gloom and doom, and suddenly, BOOM! You are 100 all out in the first game of the tour.
This is what happened to the Indian women at the Allan Border field in Brisbane today (December 5). Not long after starting slow in an ICC tournament saw them exit the competition early and empty-handed. Not long after, all the unanswered questions about selections, batting order and many other things which you can only speak about in hush-hush tones.
That’s why, on a day when Australia showed its ruthlessness, what mattered was the process that led to this embarrassing result, not the result itself.
Kim Garth was bowling as if she was plucking and throwing peach after peach from a nearby tree. She was getting it to swing away from the right-handers, and then used the wobble ball brilliantly to bring the ball in as well. Megan Schutt was bowling her typical banana swingers. And both of them were accurate.
So what do you do as a batter? Do you sit in your crease and wait for a bad ball in a limited overs game? Or do you take the initiative to alter the line and length and hence the rhythm of the bowlers by moving around in your crease or dancing down the track?
Priya Punia squandered her golden opportunity to cement the opening slot by getting stuck on her crease for 16 deliveries and then trying to whack the 17th one away. Of course, her timing was wonky. Of course, it was a mishit. And, of course, it was caught.
Smriti Mandhana played a lousy shot away from her body on the first ball Schutt bowled to her from around the wicket. It was wide and going even further away. She succumbed to that error. However, her dismissal wasn’t as concerning as the aforementioned one, or the ones that followed.
Harleen Deol committed the same mistakes Punia made. She also lost her wicket trying to smash Ash Gardner when she lofted up a ball to her. What would hurt her even more was that she had played 33 deliveries before that, and had just started to look comfortable on the crease. However, her execution was shoddy.
Her state compatriot and skipper Harmanpreet Kaur also failed at executing a proper defensive shot against a delivery from Annabel Sutherland that came into her. As she got stuck on an incoming delivery, her ever-persistent front foot issue proved to be her falling yet again.
However, her running between the wickets was more worrying. Both Harleen and Harmanpreet were saved on multiple occasions combined from getting run out by just the rub of the green going their way. Australian commentators didn’t miss a single opportunity to point out the lackadaisical running approach from the Indian batters.
A similar dissonance between the need of the game and the batting approach appeared in Jemimah Rodrigues’s batting. She was too fidgety, probably looking to create a similar momentum from her recent Women’s Big Bash League outings, which were quite successful.
As the seniors also fell by the 25th over, you would have expected that India might send Deepti Sharma ahead to bat long and deep for the side. However, in yet another mind wrecking move, Richa Ghosh, who was batting at three not so long ago, was sent ahead of her. Ghosh also succumbed trying to swat a short ball away as she failed to get even an iota of timing on the ball.
Meanwhile, Deepti was run out in a fashion that made you think she was paying for the sins of lazy running by her skipper.
Notice the pattern of dismissals and approach to batting. Notice how chaotic the thinking about constructing a batting order was.
What’s sad is that these things aren’t new. Lower-order batting has been India’s biggest batting trouble for as long as the 2017 ODI World Cup, which they lost by a whisker. And even now, despite all the supposed work done at the domestic level and by the selection committee (that has faced the media just once in its entire tenure), the problem has persisted.
Many times, questions have been asked about the batting order. The media has questioned Richa’s batting position even more. However, the answers have remained as inexplicable as the Indian team's batting performances today.
At this point, nothing suggests that the same cycle of basic errors on the field and in the planning will not continue. India might win both of the remaining games. The players are individually talented enough to win you that. Renuka Thakur and Priya Mishra even gave a glimpse of that in their bowling today, as Australia were five down by the time they scored the 100 runs needed to win the game.
However, what about the long run? What about the time when the team would be under pressure in a big tournament? Will these mistakes stop happening by an act of god?
You know the answer. You have seen this movie before. You saw it today again. And as things stand, you’ll see it again.
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