Effortless. It’s an adjective so often used in sports discourse. If there’s a top five list of adjectives used to celebrate athletes, effortless might feature in it. Effortlessly so. It is, in fact, the word that was used in Sachin Tendulkar’s tweet to describe the superlative batting effort of Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur at the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup against West Indies on Saturday. A 184-run partnership – a tournament record for India – between two superstar players paved the way for the team’s batting to bounce back from a tough evening at the very venue not too long back.
But one must wonder: what would any athlete make of their performance being called effortless? Most acts of sporting brilliance require hours and hours of effort behind the scenes, away from the spotlight and not to mention the effort during the performance. Because, make no mistake, Mandhana’s innings of 123 (119 balls, 13 fours, 2 sixes, strike rate 103.36) wouldn’t necessarily come under the effortless category, even in the conventional sense it’s used in sport. There were certainly plenty of moments where she made shot-making look easy but it wasn’t the most fluent for the initial part. It was, in her words, uncharacteristic.
“It wasn’t, like, a typical one which I just go in a flow and I started playing my shots,” Mandhana would say after the match in the press conference. “So yeah, really pleased that I could put some brakes on my scoring rate and play according to the situation and then mainly to contribute for India’s win. And I think that’s something which I really look forward to every day when I come out to bat. So I’m happy that I could do that today.”
Indeed, for the two-time ICC cricketer of the year, the innings she played itself was rather unique but it told us aplenty about her. That she could dig in. That she wanted to stand up and be counted after the team was backed into a corner a couple of days earlier. She received help from her teammates too (more on that later), but in the end, it was her own ability to adapt her game to what the team management had asked for, that took India to a score that proved beyond West Indies’ reach by some distance.
The team was evidently hurting from the batting performance that came under the scanner from all quarters. So much so that when they got off to a flier, after Mithali Raj opted to bat first, even Stafanie Taylor was left surprised by the Indian batting approach. (The West Indies captain said that after the match.)
“I think after the defeat I think we all were upset about the way we batted and we couldn’t really get the team to 260 and win the match for the team,” Mandhana said. “We did mistakes - just what we can do in this sort of a tournament is learn from it come back quickly, and do whatever we can because I think something which is - work ethics is something which we can really work on and that’s something which we all really believe in this group that if you keep working hard, we’ll get our results and that’s what I think we all discussed in the team meeting as well.”
There were no excuses being made, Mandhana was clear in her views and went about correcting an issue that she has even spoken about a few times in the past: make a good start count. There were a few nervous moments with the three-figure milestone looming, she was left “praying to two-three gods” when a sweep went to the fielder at deep midwicket and was dropped. But she made it big.
The partnership with Harmanpreet, of course, deserves all the headlines. While the highlights packages will show the fours and sixes, the crux of that partnership was also good strike rotation.
“When she came in to bat, we were focusing more on singles and doubles because we had lost three quick wickets and we didn’t want to play another shot or get out or something and we didn’t want to even stop the run rate – so our discussion was both of us said that we’ll just keep batting and I’m sure we’ll get singles and doubles, let’s just convert the singles, into doubles - that something which we all spoke in the dressing room after the New Zealand match that, we couldn’t actually start the momentum and you know, carry it also. So I think that was something which we discussed that – Yastika had set up the momentum for us in the batting and because of those three wickets, we didn’t want to lose that momentum. We had to keep it going but definitely we couldn’t afford to play a fancy shot so that’s why I think those singles and doubles were really important I think in the middle phase.”
— Smriti Mandhana on adapting to the situation and learning from the New Zealand match
And then, as the top-scorer of the innings, she was interviewed during the mid-match interval and while she was asked about her knock, she spent most of the time speaking about Yastika Bhatia’s cameo at the top and how happy she was for ‘Harry di’.
“Enjoyed [my innings] definitely. Especially the way Yastika started on a positive note, that gave me a lot of confidence the kind of shots she played. I got going, but then we lost wickets so I had to put the brakes on... very uncharacteristic innings of mine. Especially happy with also how Harry di has played. As we discussed in the team meeting we had not got a good start in the last game, we discussed that. It was all about momentum. We discussed that, had to keep the momentum high. From the first over. Yastika did that brilliantly. Her 20-30 runs actually made me like, when we lost those wickets, I was like ‘OK, we have 20-30 runs cushion’.”
— Smriti Mandhana to the broadcaster after India's innings
At the end of the match, she took things a step further by sharing the player of the match award with Harmanpreet, seeing as she believed that both of them contributed equally to India’s score and as a batter, she wouldn’t have wanted just one person getting recognised.
“I’m sure ICC will be giving another trophy and I’m sure they have enough budget to do that,” she joked too, as the duo shared one more moment of happiness together on a day when their partnership brought as much joy to each other as it did to the India faithful watching on.
Even if she’s “veteran” Smriti Mandhana in many ways already (with more than 150 international matches and she is still 25), her day out in Hamilton felt significant, and that’s not just speaking about her fifth ODI century and second at the World Cups, once again West Indies at the receiving end. Sure, a World Cup century will anyway be memorable for any cricketer and their fans. But for Mandhana, the 123 against West Indies in Hamilton on March 12, 2022, might just be a milestone moment in the longer run too, of what is already a career destined for greatness.
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