India in desperate need of solving middle-order jigsaw to avoid another heart-break
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43/2 in 5.3 overs against Australia. 53/2 in 5.3 overs against Bangladesh and 46/1 in 5 overs against New Zealand. Then - 132 against Australia, 142 against Bangladesh and 133/8 at the end of 20 overs against the White Ferns. Do you see a pattern there? You sure do.
The very fact that the Indian eves have squandered these positions to reach a level of mediocrity, only to be pulled back by the very gutsy spin bowling line-up and the military medium pace of Shikha Pandey, makes it a case in point of how bad the middle-order has been in the ongoing World Cup. While Shafali Verma is doing the Shafali Verma things in a very rare time of Smriti Mandhana failures, everything seems obnoxious for the Indian batting line-up, with the bowlers having the task of punching above the weight every single time.
If you remember, the similar problem came out to haunt the Indian men’s team in the World Cup semi-final match against New Zealand and almost all the major ICC events India played in the last six years. It was the condemnatory denunciation of a tragic fact that team management never really understood and never acted in a justifying manner. The Indian women’s team’s continuous failures to set up big targets and the under-performance of the middle-order reeks of the similar kind of fortune and if not addressed, it would definitely come to bite at the most inopportune of time as it did for Virat Kohli and his band of boys.
Look at Harmanpreet Kaur as an example. The Indian batsman, who perhaps played the women’s cricket’s most important innings almost three years ago against Australia, has been struggling for form for quite a while now, with the last T20I half-century coming in the 2018 Women’s World Cup in West Indies. She has played a total of 27 limited-overs matches in between - 21 T20Is and 6 ODIs - and hardly looked convincing enough to get those runs on board. The stage of denial has come to a position of no return and the push should come to shove sooner than later. If the World Cup semi-final or indeed the final becomes a victim of this, then the team and indeed its fans should be hurt for a long long time, especially after throwing away the 50-Over World Cup at Lord’s on the face of an Anya Shrubsole-inflicted collapse where they had business losing.
Smriti Mandhana, for the longest time, has been India’s most consistent batsman and it is not for nothing that she has been the women’s cricket’s tallest run-scorer in the last two years too. She lightened the stage in England during the Kia Super League, owned the Big Bash League for Hobart Hurricanes and was at the helm of the affairs for nearly every match she turned up in the national colours. Her performance masked the performance of the lower-middle order but once she fell apart - although it is because we have set a high standard for her - the chinks in the team are more visible than ever, which further compounded by Jemimah Rodrigues’ cautious batting show.
For her exploits now, Rodrigues has been a superstar in the women's cricket now. At an age when most of the women’s cricketers in India pick up a bat for the first time, she timed the balls to perfection and was already a member of the West Zone women’s team at the age of 14. Her rise to the stardom was as affluent a story as there has been but the fearlessness, which gave her a cutting edge, is missing for the time being. Sure enough, her innings against Australia was worth a fifty but she is far better than your mediocre cricketer and India can’t afford her to slip even a bit on the cricket field.
It is a never-ending cycle because, in all three matches, the team were saved by a Shafali Verma masterclass and later some spin carnage, with occasional contribution from the rest. Rodrigues and Deepti Sharma were to the rescue with a slow but important partnership against defending champions and tournament favourites Australia while Veda Krishnamurthy played a nine-ball 20 cameo against Bangladesh. But those innings have been far and few in between and at the Junction Oval, Krishnamurthy flattered to deceive once again, leaving the gaping hole way too big.
As the men’s team have shown - 2014 T20 World Cup final against Sri Lanka, 2015 World Cup semi-final against Australia, 2016 World T20 semi-final against West Indies, 2017 Champions Trophy final against Pakistan, and more recently, the 2019 semi-final against New Zealand - it really doesn’t matter how much peppering you do to the cracks, the chinks explodes when you dread it the most. The bubble bursts, leaving the dreams lie like a dust particle. If you are an Indian cricket fan, you must have realised that on June 17, 2017, and July 10, 2019.
The amount of effort that this Indian line-up has put in and the heartbreaks they have been served in recent times - be it the 2017 Lord’s debacle or the 2018 T20 semi-final loss in Antigua - they can’t afford to have one more. It is make or break time and for the middle-order, it is the time to stand up and deliver on the promise.
