“The way I was batting, that was the only way for me to get out.” – Harmanpreet Kaur on her runout.
Telford Vice / Newlands
RARELY in the long and winding annals of bat-throwing has a specimen been hurled with as much vitriol as Harmanpreet Kaur unleashed at Newlands on Thursday. Her respiratory tract infection still stuck in her throat, her helmet ripped off her head, her eyes ablaze, she let fly with visceral anger.
Rather than a scene from a cricket match, it was straight out of a cage fight. Actually, it might have had her disqualified from a cage fight. Whatever else you do around this woman, do not get in her way.
The bat flew many metres into the outfield as if it had been spat out of Harmanpreet’s consciousness never to return, twisting and turning gracelessly through the afternoon air, then landing ugly, bouncing back up, and travelling further still towards the dark alley of shadow cast by the members’ pavilion, whose denizens would deplore such behaviour. Happily, hardly any of them were in attendance.
Don’t feel sorry for the bat. It was not an innocent. The damn fool thing had lodged itself in the pitch instead of gliding seamlessly across the turf and the crease, and causing Harmanpreet to be run out. It had earned its unscheduled journey to nowhere.
Yes, Harmanpreet should have angled her bat better to avoid her fate. Yes, players are taught to do what she failed to do when they are children learning the game. No, she didn’t deserve to be cast as the villain of her team coming closer than most to beating Australia in a T20 World Cup semifinal. She might disagree.
“If my bat didn’t get stuck I would’ve easily finished that run,” Harmanpreet said in the aftermath, stoney-faced and clearly still riled. “If I had stayed till the last moments we could have definitely finished the match one over earlier as we had the momentum. But even after that, Deepti [Sharma] was there, Richa [Ghosh] was there. I had the belief that they could do it, too, because Richa has also batted well in all the matches till now. But after I got out we played seven or eight dot balls in the middle and the match turned. Otherwise, we got a good momentum and the match was going well.”
In fact, India scored three runs off the next six deliveries after the runout. But she wasn’t wrong — that’s where the match was won and lost. Harmanpreet’s dismissal ended a stand of 35 off 26 with Ghosh, which followed her partnership of 69 off 41 with Jemima Rodrigues. When India’s captain took guard, at 28/3 in the fourth, her team needed 8.88 runs an over. When she was removed, they needed 40 off 32. The match was there for the winning. Until it wasn’t.
“My runout was a turning point. Otherwise we were in the game. Everything was going in our favour. It was a disappointment because the way I was batting, that was the only way for me to get out. The way I was meeting the ball, I knew how to take this innings to the end. From the Australian team’s body language, it looked like they had given up the match. But the moment I got out the momentum shifted.”
India finished five runs shy of overhauling Australia’s 172/4, but the truth of it was they had no right to run the perennial and defending champions that close. They had put in a shocking display in the field, leaking runs alarmingly and dropping three catches, and their bowling was scarcely better.
On top of that, the Indians weren’t sure their captain would be involved considering she had sought relief from her infection at a hospital on Wednesday. “Until the team meeting [on Thursday morning], we didn’t even know whether she would play,” Rodrigues said. “When I saw her dragging her bag I had just stepped out of my room, and I knew she was going to play. It’s not easy. Harry Di, from the time she’s come here, she’s been falling sick, she has injuries. And I’ve hardly seen her bat in the nets because something or the other was happening to her. Imagine the kind of thing she was going through, mentally. To come out there and play the way she did said so much about her mental strength and determination. She’s passionate about the sport and this team. And about winning.”
Instead Australia won their 10th consecutive completed women’s T20I, a stream of success that might have been 22 games long and stretched back more than 16 months had it not been for their loss to India in a super over in Mumbai in December last year.
Their bottomless batting produced stands of 52 off 45 between Alyssa Healy and Beth Mooney, 36 off 27 between Mooney and Meg Lanning, 53 off 36 between Lanning and Ash Gardner, and 24 off nine between Lanning and Ellyse Perry.
They spilled one catch, in the 13th when Healy lunged to where a slip might have been and dropped Harmanpreet off Darcie Brown, but otherwise handed down a fielding masterclass. The prime example was Perry, and the best of her sterling work came in the 19th over when Sneh Rana swept Jess Jonassen for what looked for all money like four. Only for Perry to swoop, dive, and flick the ball several metres back from whence it came, all in one magnificent motion, to limit the damage to two.
“We showed our class today in the field,” Gardner said. “We always speak about being the best fielding team in the world, and I think we really showed that. We took those pivotal moments when we needed to. Ellyse Perry was elite on the boundary, the blueprint for our side. Fielding could have been something that was the difference between us and them.”
But Australia weren’t at all assured of success when India reached a runrate of 9.30 midway through their innings — 1.30 better than was required, and with Rodrigues and Harmanpreet in full flow. It wasn’t so much that the Australians bowled badly, but that the Indians were batting with enterprise and intent.
“At the 10-over mark in India’s innings everyone had probably written us off,” Gardner said. “That shows our character and that’s why the best teams win from those positions. When our backs are against the wall we always try and find a way. Today we probably had no right to win at one point. They were cruising. And then we found a way to get some wickets.”
Champions do that. Great champions do it again and again and again. Australia, who have won this trophy five times in its seven previous editions and have reached the final seven times, are already in that category. They have earned a stab at being heralded as even greater champions.
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