India in desperate need of solving middle-order jigsaw to avoid another heart-break

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.

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. 

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.