Smriti Mandhana: a Frida Kahlo nuclear bomb

She has unlocked new gears to her batting. And she's maxing them out.

Buy your copy of ‘The Art of Batting’ here:

The graphs are updated up until the start of the ongoing World Cup.

---

Ash Gardner is broken. She has good reason to be - her figures read 0/48 in only 3.3 overs against India in Delhi. Only seven times in 79 ODIs has she gone for more runs in an entire innings. At one stage, she sees a step hit go sailing back over her head. The sort of shot that turns the bowler into a birdwatcher, craning their neck around to watch the flightpath.

Smriti Mandhana has already smashed seven boundaries off the Australian offspinner. She adds another four off the next delivery, as Beth Mooney almost catches it.

Chasing 413, Smriti makes 40 off 16 against one of the best spinners in the world.

That sounded laughable a few months ago. Before the latest India-Australia series, Smriti had scored 68 off 75 against Gardner, but at the cost of five dismissals. No other bowler has taken her wicket more often in ODIs. And this is not random, because it’s a trend we’ve seen in T20 cricket too. No bowler dominates the Indian lefty like Gardner. And in one innings, she hits all that away.

This knock means Smriti becomes the Indian with the fastest century in ODI cricket, taking up only 50 balls to get to the landmark. Only Meg Lanning’s 45-ball ton against New Zealand in 2012 is faster in the women’s game. But that was before the professional era; Smriti is doing it in front of a packed house in the capital of India, with a game streamed and televised to millions.

This was her eighth hundred in her last 26 innings. Nobody has ever had such a streak - not even Lanning, who took 34 innings at her best. In fact, only 11 other players have eight or more centuries in their entire career.

But Smriti hasn’t just cracked consistency; it’s also the speed at which she’s scoring truckloads of runs. In Delhi, she is not afraid to use her feet and put the pressure back on Australia. Her boundaries are in a variety of regions - down the ground, towards midwicket and covers, as well as behind square on the legside.

While she was still batting, the chase was on. Nobody could stop the Indian southpaw. Eventually, Grace Harris’ rank full toss is what ends it, a horrendous way to be dismissed for a towering 125 off 63.

It’s Ash Gardner, who takes a quality running catch. There are no extravagant celebrations though; just a quiet, little high-five with a teammate.

Despite this incredible knock, India lose the match. Against Australia, that is fairly normal. But by hitting them so viciously, the Aussies know this is a different player. They see some of it with the fours, but they really feel it with the sixes.

When Smriti Mandhana bats now, everything goes further.

***

Shubman Gill compared Smriti’s play-style to that of Damien Martyn because of the slow, lazy elegance in her batting. She is without a doubt one of the best timers of a cricket ball, and has a cover drive and inside out shot to die for.

But that conjures up images of a surgeon, and this new version of Smriti is a velvet glove hiding a sledgehammer.

Her talent has always been obvious. Against the best team in the universe, she went to Hobart as a teenager and made her first hundred. Even putting Mithali Raj and Harmanpreet Kaur in the shade.

She became the second-youngest Indian woman to score an ODI hundred after Mithali. 2016 was her breakout year, as she made 320 runs at an average of 40 and a strike rate of 86.

Smriti’s talent was evident from the early days - she was the first Indian woman to make a double hundred in a one-day game, as she made 224* off just 150 balls in the West Zone U-19 tournament back in 2013.

But she didn’t have it easy at all in her first three years of ODIs. She only notched up three half-centuries across her first 15 knocks.

We have true values for women’s ODIs since early 2017. That was when they played the World Cup. The left-handed Indian opener was just ten short of a century against hosts England on World Cup debut, followed by an unbeaten hundred versus the West Indies. Unfortunately for India and her, that would be her only two impactful knocks that tournament. She could not buy another run for the rest of it.

But she followed it up with a couple of flat-out insane years. She had a true average of nearly 26 and a true strike rate of 32 - a peak very similar to her current run.

But the big difference really is how often she’s converted her fifties to hundreds now. She had 13 scores above 50 from just 19 innings then, but only two of those would be centuries. While her frequency of 50+ scores may have dipped a little now, eight out of 14 are hundreds.

When she gets in now, it’s a long one.

The other two players in her cluster in the early peak period were Meg Lanning and Sophie Devine - consistent batters who didn’t trade runs for strike rate, unlike the Mithali Raj and Ellyse Perry cluster. Or vice-versa, like Lizelle Lee and Chloe Tryon.

She was good, but not an outlier for the next few years. A quality player not making a huge impact.

However, what we’ve witnessed since the start of 2024 is absolutely magical. Only four batters have a better true average, and just two surpass her true strike rate.

Hayley Matthews is one of her nearest neighbours, but we have to remember that she hasn’t faced top teams as often as Smriti; West Indies played the World Cup qualifiers and didn’t qualify for the tournament. Of course, you can argue Matthews plays on a weaker side, so it makes her achievements more impressive.

Either way, they are the top two batters in terms of overall record since the start of last year.

***

This is a new level. One that few players have reached.