India celebrated the return of women’s Test cricket in the nation with a record-breaking 347-run thrashing of England at Navi Mumbai.
It took India a little more than two hours on the third day to wrap up the Test match, the first on Indian soil for nine years. If England’s first-innings effort (136 in 35.3 overs) seemed ordinary, they fared even worse in the second (131 in 27.3).
After being on the field in the Navi Mumbai heat for nearly ten hours across two days – there is no winter in the Mumbai area – England tried to make a fight of it as Sophia Dunkley and Tammy Beaumont went after the bowling from the onset, adding 27 quick runs.
Then Renuka Singh Thakur, one of three debutants here, had a close leg-before shout against Beaumont. It came at the end of a string of inswingers from Thakur. The next ball held its line and knocked the off-stump out.
At the post-match press conference, Harmanpreet Kaur mentioned that India had declared overnight because the seamers had found assistance with the new ball. Thakur had validated Kaur’s point but, despite that, India opened with Sneh Rana’s off-breaks at the other end in both innings: at the press conference, Kaur explained that she did not want the batters to get used to either pace or spin.
Pooja Vastrakar replaced Rana in only the tenth over, having already had a fine Test match by this point this point. She had not been dismissed, had run Beaumont out in the first innings with a direct hit and taken out Heather Knight. But what she did now hastened England’s end.
Dunkley, having survived Thakur’s opening spell for the first time in five attempts on this tour, cut Vastrakar’s third ball to the fielder. Out strode Nat Sciver-Brunt, Player of the Match in the first T20I and top-scorer in England’s first innings, and before that, Player of the Match in the final when the Mumbai Indians won the maiden edition of the WPL.
Vastrakar’s next ball was on a length, just outside the off stump. It did not move much, but somehow found the gap between Sciver-Brunt’s bat and pad to hit timber.
Once Vastrakar (3-23) trapped Knight leg-before again to take her third wicket in twelve balls, England caved in. The rest of the batting order wilted away – not all of them to outstanding balls – against Deepti Sharma (4-32) and Rajeshwari Gayakwad (2-20) on a pitch that, in Knight’s words, deteriorated quicker than they had anticipated.
Sharma was rightly named the Player of the Match for becoming the third cricketer, after Betty Wilson and Katherine Sciver-Brunt, to score a fifty and claim two four-wicket hauls in the same Test match. Yet, despite her outstanding effort, the sheer number of Indians who performed in the Test match was astounding.
Was the match decided on the first day?
India had come out all guns blazing from the onset. Smriti Mandhana had not slowed down even after Beaumont misjudged a catch in the second over, and neither did Shafali Verma. One might have expected Shubha Satheesh and Jemimah Rodrigues, the debutants, to exercise caution when they got together at 47-2 in the ninth over: instead, they decided to counterattack.
Both made fifties. If Shubha’s 76-ball 69 was chancy, it was also the more exhilarating of the two innings. Her debut was unlike the others’, for she had – somewhat unusually, given the scarcity of the format – played Test cricket before either ODIs or T20Is. Here, she began with a gorgeous extra-cover drive to the fence off the second ball she faced and ended up smashing the second-fastest Test fifty by an Indian.
Rodrigues, more cautious, scored a run fewer than Shubha. Kaur missed the same landmark by a run – her run out was a deja vu moment from the T20 World Cup semi-final – but Yastika Bhatia and Sharma got sixties as well, helping a bizarre scorecard with four different individual returns between 66 and 69.
England’s long day seemed longer, for Sophie Ecclestone had a rare off day at work. India kept going at over four an over, becoming the second team in history (and the first since the first season in the history of the format) to amass four hundred in a day.
To win a Test match inside four days, India had to give the bowlers enough time to take twenty wickets on a surface that Shubha called “beautiful to bat on” after the first day. By stumps, they were 410-7, and had as good as secured at least a draw.
There could have been few better advertisements for women’s Test cricket, but there were only a few hundreds in the stands to applaud that day or even on the next. The DY Patil Sports Academy shares its vast campus with a university and more, but there was hardly anyone coming in even in the final hour. Saturday, coupled with the prospect of a win, perhaps drew a few more – but the stands still seemed empty.
England’s great collapse
England started the second day well. They only allowed India to add 18 to their overnight total, and – despite two early blows – seemed settled at 79-2, 108-3, and perhaps even at 126-4. Then they lost six wickets for ten runs in six overs.
Kaur had opened bowling with pace and spin and, barring a brief phase, had at least one spinner bowling throughout the innings. However, Rana (2-25) and Sharma (5-7) joined hands once the pacers came off, and maintained an excellent line and length to let the pitch do the rest.
Sharma, in particular, was spot on, as Sciver-Brunt said at the end of Day Two, she made the batters “not sure whether to come forward or back … She bowled lengths that were difficult to read, and she also attacked the stumps.”
To add to that, some balls turned too much, and some held their line. The bounce, while not as variable on the third day, was not easy either, though Sciver-Brunt made a well-crafted 59: “When you come to India to play, you are expecting a slightly slower surface that takes turn, and face experienced spinners,” she said. “The way to combat that would be to get really far forward or really far back and then using my sweep the best I can.”
If England found batting difficult, so did India, who had decided to bat again despite a 292-run lead. Kaur wanted 500 to be on the safe side in a format where no team has successfully chased 200 to win a Test match.
Mandhana and Verma added 61 for the opening stand in 77 balls, but at this point, Charlie Dean stepped up with an incisive spell of 4-68. Ecclestone also struck twice (she got five in the Test match despite not being at her best). There was no Shubha, who had broken a finger during fielding practice ahead of the second day’s play, but India had added 186 to their lead by stumps.
The fate of the Test match had been decided long before that, though not many would have expected India surpass Sri Lanka’s record margin of 309 runs. It is a pity that the feat was witnessed by so few who, despite their enthusiastic cheers in the third morning, could not make up for the lack of numbers.
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