Team India's Post-Mithali Raj Era: It's Harman's Time, It's Harman's Team

Harmanpreet Kaur's first assignment as India captain will be the Sri Lanka tour.

Having one captain in charge of 20-over cricket and another of 50-over cricket has never been a great formula. Look around the world and see if at all there is one captain for the red-ball side and one for the white-ball side.

For instance, Aaron Finch is leading Australia's white-ball side while Pat Cummins is doing a terrific job of leading the Australian Test team. Earlier Joe Root was, and now Ben Stokes is, in charge of the England Test team while Eoin Morgan has taken England's white-ball cricket to lofty heights.

In India as well, Virat Kohli tried to blaze a trail by giving up the T20I captaincy with the hope of leading the ODI team till the 2023 ODI World Cup, but it did not work out.

Clearly, having two different captains for ODI cricket and T20 cricket is not the ideal way to go. But somehow, Mithali Raj and Harmanpreet Kaur had been performing a balancing act over the last couple of years.

Amid attempts to keep the plot together, Harman, who will forever be remembered for her match-winning blitz against Australia in the semi-final of the 2017 ODI World Cup, remained out of form for a considerable period and there were demands for her to be sacked from the T20I captaincy.

Former Indian captains Shantha Rangaswamy and Diana Edulji both advocated for Smriti Mandhana to be given the captaincy after Mithali Raj. The latter was much more critical of Kaur and also demanded for her to be dropped from the XI.

Kaur finally broke the shackles on the true surfaces of Australia during the Women's Big Bash League 2021, becoming the first Indian to win the Player of the Tournament award in the competition as she finished with not only 399 runs at 66.50 and a strike rate of 135.25 but also 15 wickets at an economy rate of 7.46 in her dazzling performance for the Melbourne Renegades.

Fortunately for Team India, she broke out of her international rut at a very crucial moment, bringing up an ODI half-century after almost a year, in the fifth ODI against New Zealand right before the 2022 ODI World Cup.

She carried the same form in the showpiece event as well, finishing as the second-highest run-scorer for India behind Smriti Mandhana, with 318 runs from seven outings at an impressive average of 53 and a strike rate of over 90, with a best of 109 runs against West Indies.

The Moga-born cricketer also did an amazing job of leading the Supernovas to their third Women's T20 Challenge title recently. Kaur was astute in her captaincy decisions, but more importantly shone bright with the bat, being the highest run-scorer in the competition with 151 runs at 50.33 and a strike rate of 138.53. It reiterated that at 33, she is not done yet and has some good years of cricket still left in her.

Harmanpreet's international numbers are quite impressive with 2,982 runs from 118 ODIs at 35.50 and 2,319 runs from 121 T20 Internationals at 26.35. Kaur remains a tentative starter but once she gets going, she has as many shots in her repertoire as anybody else in world cricket.

Now, with Mithali Raj having hung her majestic bat for good from international cricket – however sad it may be, it was essential for Indian women's cricket to take a new direction – Harmanpreet Kaur will hopefully have free rein as the leader of the Indian team across formats and do things her own way.

A Fresh Start

The new Indian ODI captain made no bones about her being more comfortable in the new role.

"I think things will be easier for me now because [when] two different captains were there, sometimes things were not easy because we both had different ideas," Kaur said in a press conference right before the Indian team left for Sri Lanka to play in 3 ODIs and 3 T20Is, starting 23 June. "But now the players will think clearly [and know] what I am demanding as a captain, and everybody can look forward to that. It's easier for me to ask them what I'm expecting from them, so things will be much easier for me and my teammates also."

Harmanpreet Kaur has got the much-required freedom in running the team at a time when India has several important assignments coming up, starting with the auspicious Commonwealth Games in July-August this year. The Asia Cup (October 2021) and the T20 World Cup (February 2023) are also on the horizon.

While India are still looking for additions to their pace bowling stocks despite having the likes of Pooja Vastrakar, Meghna Singh, and Renuka Thakur in their ranks, the team has no dearth of options when it comes to batting, with extremely talented top order players Sabbhineni Meghana and Jemimah Rodrigues waiting for regular opportunities.

"We are behind Australia and England in fitness, but not skill," Harmanpreet Kaur said in an interview in 2020. This might be the most profound statement about the current state of Indian women's cricket.

Just think of the number of dropped catches, misfields, overthrows, and poor running between the wickets in the last ODI World Cup, and there would be no doubt in one's mind that India would have cruised to the final, even if 50 percent of these unforced errors had been taken care of.

Skill is obviously an evolving feature, but the Indian women cricketers are not short on it. What they desperately need is a new culture with an increased focus on fitness and temperament, something similar to the revolution which Virat Kohli brought to Indian men's cricket a decade ago, and Harmanpreet Kaur will have a sure-shot winning team on her hands.