India’s incredible chase
The best team in the world had chances to win this game, but the other team played magnificently.
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There’s a moment when Tahlia McGrath is about to take the catch of Jemimah Rodrigues. You look at Alyssa Healy, and she’s sort of casually, confidently stepping towards the bowler. She’s thinking this is going to be a wicket, and we will go down, and we will celebrate this.
Because this is what we do.
We are the Australian women’s cricket team. We are the Harlem Globetrotters. We don’t lose games. We’re certainly not going to lose this one, even though we’ve made it more difficult than we need to. And she gets like a step and a half, and then suddenly the ball just goes through McGrath’s hand.
If you look, it’s not even just her. Annabel Sutherland’s doing the same sort of casual walk. They’re not panicked. They’re behind in the game, and India’s playing incredible cricket.
But they’re probably thinking something is eventually going to break for them, and they’ll win this game. That’s the sort of confidence you get when you almost never lose cricket games.
When your entire career is just winning cricket games, that’s the sort of thing which ends up happening. You think to yourself, well, we could lose, but we are not going to lose because someone will take an incredible catch. Or there’ll be a run out out of nowhere. Or a back-of-the-hand slower ball hit straight up in the air. Or we’ll get an LBW.
This is what they believe, and they’re not wrong to do. The Australian women’s cricket team has been so dominant for so long that it’s almost shocking when they lose.
And so Alyssa Healy is expecting Tahlia McGrath to take what is an incredibly easy catch, but she didn’t. Because of that, India probably pulled off one of the best knockout chases you will ever see. That was an extraordinary match.
***
So in 2017, I went to Derby. And I’ll be honest, in my whole professional career covering cricket in England, I haven’t actually gone there all that much. But I was there that particular year because the Women’s World Cup was on, and Australia were playing India. As always, we assumed the Australian women would win.
And then, Harmanpreet Kaur comes out. It was such a weird day too - I was working for Cricinfo at the time, and for whatever reason it was the day that they changed their design. So it was incredibly poorly timed, and the website wasn’t working correctly. Everyone on Twitter was asking us questions about it.
We were trying to work out how we could do our jobs correctly. While all this was happening, Australia were being absolutely slogged into tiny pieces by Harmanpreet Kaur. It was still, to this day, one of the more surprising innings I’ve ever seen. In a lifetime of covering cricket, I would never not remember the Harmanpreet one. Like, I’ll remember how the press box chairs felt.
I still remember the noise from that game when one of the balls actually hit the press box, like it made a noise. There’s something about that game, the way that the crowd reacted to it and everything else.
That has always stuck with me. But more than that, it’s not just about how it made me feel. That’s the game that really changes women’s cricket forever, right? Harmanpreet going absolutely nuts is what changes everything. You can see the ratings, you can see Cricinfo suddenly changing their website and then recrashing again because they weren’t ready for the amount of traffic they were going to get on that date.
It was watching people learn about women’s cricket in real time. It was breathtaking and dynamic. But when you go back to the innings, it is just someone slogging to the legside a lot. And Harmanpreet has more shots than that. But on that particular day, she decided that she could clear that ground.
And she just went for it, time and time again. It was sort of messy and chaotic. I remember talking to the Australian team in the press conference and I was trying to ask if they underestimated India. Watching them, it felt that at times they actually didn’t have game plans for the opposition because they were just so much better than everyone else.
And I was trying to get that out of Matthew Mott and Meg Lanning. But the look on Matthew Mott’s face, specifically, was that no, we lost this because Harmanpreet Kaur just did this incredible thing.
****
Fast forward to this game, and that’s not really what happens, right? Australia make well over 300. So it isn’t one of those situations where one Indian player got away, and you could certainly say that Australia should have made 20 more. I would argue they should have made 40 more.
At one stage, I thought if Phoebe Litchfield kept going, they might get towards 400 here with the hitters at the other end. But India just kept getting wickets. And we have said from the very start of this tournament that the only way to stop Australia’s batting is by taking wickets.
Their batting lineup is absolutely bananas, right? Kim Garth and Alana King - who bat at No.9 and No.10 for Australia - could bat at six or seven for some of these other World Cup teams. That’s how good their batting actually is. There are very few international teams in the history of the game who have managed to have batting that deep - men’s, women’s, anything.
The ability to bat till nine or ten is just phenomenal. But sometimes when teams do that - like the South African men’s team in the 1990s - there’s a trade off. You don’t really have as many frontline bowlers as you should need.
You’ve packed so many allrounders in, that you don’t have frontline bowlers. But the thing with the Australian team is that Ash Gardner and Annabel Sutherland are both frontline bowlers, and Kim Garth would be batting way higher in other teams. And so they end up with this thing where there’s no chop out. There’s no respite.
Yes, Tahlia McGrath sometimes has a bit of a rough day with the ball. She gets sprayed around a little bit. They’ve got seven other options to make up their overs. There’s always other options. They’ve got finger spin, they’ve got wrist spin. They swing it at the top.
They’re maybe not the best bowling attack that this team has ever had, but it’s the deepest and it’s ridiculously talented on every single level. So you have this Australian team that has all this bowling and batting depth.
The only way to beat them is exactly what India showed us today, which is to find a way to take their wickets.
When you go back and have a look at it, Australia were so far in front that I don’t even think the Indian fans realized what was happening.
But every time India took a wicket, there was just another slowdown. There was just a moment. And they piled up enough wickets that in the end, Australia didn’t finish out their overs. Now, they practically finished out their overs, but there was a big squeeze on the end of that game.
Realistically, it’s the difference between putting on a total that I’m just not sure India would’ve physically been able to chase. It would’ve been on the minds of their batters all the way through.
They got themselves into a position where if they didn’t lose early wickets, they could do this. And the other flaw that the Australian team has had, and we’ve been talking about for quite some time, is that they don’t always take early wickets.
India’s top-order is absolutely brilliant at making big chunks of runs. Yet, they have just beaten Australia without one of their opening batters, Pratika Rawal. They’re down a player, and they still managed to put on huge runs at the top and put that pressure back on Australia.
***
Look at what the pressure did. You saw it play with both teams at different times, right? India dropped a really easy catch early on, and fielded poorly. But look at what happened with Australia.
There were head high full tosses. When the ball got a bit dewy, it was just squeezing out of their fingers. They didn’t field as well as they usually do. Even when they got to balls, it felt like they would get to the balls in the same way that they normally would, but they wouldn’t quite get them.
India just kept the pressure on and kept the pressure on, which is what they did with the ball. It just doesn’t look like that because that was such a flat wicket and you made a lot of runs anyway. But once you saw it with the bat, you were like, Australia just need wickets here.
I kept waiting for the collapse. Maybe not even a massive one, but just a mini one. But India never allowed it. They were in such control of that chase even when they were behind the rate.
I think it’s really, really interesting to be comfortable enough in your own skin against the best team in the world. They went, no, we don’t have to be ahead of the rate here. We have Richa Ghosh later on. We can just make sure that we’re within touching distance and see what happens.
And we saw what happened. That Tahlia McGrath catch was a perfect example that Australia just weren’t on their game. There was another point when Jemimah Rodrigues was sitting on the pitch and Australia could not run her out.
That’s the kind of day, the kind of game, that you don’t get many of from Australia. I don’t think they were at their best all that often in this World Cup, even though they were unbeaten in the group stage. They gave opposition teams quite a few chances of beating them.
But when you go back and look at this tournament, they would give you one chance and if you didn’t take it straight away, that was it. They would end you. In this particular case, India really didn’t give Australia many chances. And the very few times they did, it didn’t work.
And so you have Alyssa Healy expecting the Tahlia McGrath catch to happen. You have Alyssa Healy literally commentating, saying, throw the ball to me, throw the ball to me, while Rodrigues is sitting on the middle of the wicket.
You have that other moment where Alana King gets a top edge and it goes flying up in the air. It goes so high, and then Alyssa Healy comes over to take what is one of the most routine catches of all time. And I say that in the same match that Tahlia McGrath dropped one of those, but it was one of the simplest catches ever.
And Australia let it go. India almost didn’t do anything wrong in this game. They kept themselves in it time and time again. But when they tried to give it back to Australia, Australia weren’t ready.
The best team in the world had chances to win this game, but the other team played magnificently. Their batting card is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
And because of that, India are in the World Cup final.