Women In Blue

Celebrating the present and the exciting future of India’s women’s cricket team

- Alshaar Khan

The Indian women’s cricket team is on the cusp of something historic during their ongoing travels Down Under. Beginning September 30, they would have played their first-ever pink-ball Test, something that only two other women’s teams in the world have accomplished thus far.

This will also mark the Women in Blue’s second big Test match this year, after playing out a well-earned draw on their tour to England in June. That series also ended a wretched spell for the Indian team that had not played on foreign soil since the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup final against hosts Australia on March 8, 2020 (their second back-to-back final after losing out to champions England in the 2017 Women’s Cricket World Cup).

This run included a 364-day spell without any cricket, the blame for which runs deeper than just the pandemic. The preparations for the 2020 season of the IPL and the following men’s tour to Australia coincided with inferior communication about training camps etc for their women counterparts. Even their domestic season began two months after the men while they went into the South Africa series at home (their first since the T20 WC final) with just three training camps under their belts.

The absence of a body, advocating the interests of active Indian women’s cricketers, hasn’t helped either. Notwithstanding these obstacles though, Mithali Raj & Co. put up a spirited display in their 2-1 ODI and T20I series losses in England. The peak of their resilience was displayed in the one-off Test, which featured critical performances from almost all of their five debutants.

The fact that they could even have won that drawn Test was testimony to the riches of talents in the team’s ranks. Wisden had blamed ‘no context, no domestic structure, and zero opportunities in the domestic game to hone their redball skills’ for the lack of a killer instinct.