Harmanpreet Kaur plays a shot vs Australia in the Women's World Cup semifinal match in Navi Mumbai. (Express Photo | Amit Chakravarty)An anecdote about Harmanpreet Kaur from 2016 perfectly sums up her competitiveness. Harshal Pathak, who worked on refining her batting technique for a couple of years leading up to the 2017 World Cup, recalls a nets session one evening before a regular practice match-up with some male cricketers on a Sunday. They had been working on improving her pull shot, so he asked one of the Under-16 pacers, who was sharp, to try a bouncer at her. Harmanpreet was late to the pull, and the ball hit her on the shoulder, bruising her. The next morning, she turned up for the match, gave Pathak the green light she can play and started warming up.
“After the warm-up, she just came to me and asked, ‘Woh kal waala bowler kis team mein hain?’ I said he is in your team. She said, ‘Nahi sir, usko opposite team mein daalo. Usko rakh rakh ke dene waali hoon mein’,” Pathak tells The Indian Express. “And she actually smacked the crap out of him. That is the defining factor about Harman.”
It is perhaps the perfect illustration of why Harmanpreet has almost always turned up with her best performances in high-pressure games and against the top teams. It is perhaps why, according to cricket statistician John Leather, Harmanpreet has now scored the second most runs in the history of Women’s World Cup knockout matches: 311 in just three innings (with that famous 171* and two other half centuries), and 20 runs away from overtaking the legendary Belinda Clark’s record of 330 runs over six knockouts. It is surely why Harmanpreet was able to channel into that zone on Thursday in Navi Mumbai against Australia, scoring a significant 88-ball 89 that rolled the clock back.
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At the end of the match, emotions came bursting out of Harmanpreet – arms went up in relief with a roars, tears started rolling down as she hugged everyone around her, and then Jemimah Rodrigues in the middle. But during the course of her innings, she batted with a steely determination. “More than the technical part, I could see it on her face that she meant business. How do I put this? There was a… reassuring calmness on her face. It was that old, vintage Harman’s bat flow that we had really worked on before 2017,” Pathak, who is now in Thailand as the men’s team head coach, tells from Bangkok, where he says he watched every ball of the run-chase.
Coach Harshal Pathak (L) with Harmanpreet Kaur during a training session at BKC, MCA Mumbai from 2017. (Special Arrangement)
Technically, Harmanpreet was at her calculative best. Previously in the tournament, she had been trying to bat with a high tempo from the word go, but this was classic Harman, who didn’t seem bothered with starting slow. She was happy to get her eye in but once she did, the radar started to fire. Interestingly, after a highly premeditated sweep early on, she put that shot away for the rest of the night for the most part. While Rodrigues employed sweep and reverse sweep to good effect, Harmanpreet used her feet more to move down the track or rock back in the crease. The areas she targeted were largely in the arc between extra cover and midwicket, with eight of her 10 fours and both exquisite sixes coming at each end of that sector. “She had that beautiful bat flow, she had decided the areas where she was going to target,” Pathak adds.
One of the standout shots was the six just after she reached her 50; a shot that definitively signalled a shift in gears as she caught up with Rodrigues in no time with a flurry of boundaries. The bat came down in one fluid motion as she smashed a length ball in the channel outside off stump from Tahlia McGrath over extra cover. “It reminded me of her shot in the first WBBL she played where the bowler just started smiling after it went for six. I still remember the sessions around 2016-’16 at the Cadence Cricket Academy. Harman told me that she wanted to really nail that area through extra cover. We had some very good male spinners, state U19 and U16 level guys. We did deliberate repetitive practices, target-based and constraint-based routines. She picked it up pretty quickly.”
It had been a tough start to the World Cup for Harmanpreet with the bat, but it was clear that she was specifically working on using a straight bat to balls targeted on her pads. In Guwahati, a day before the opener against Sri Lanka, the main batters in the squad had a full-fledged nets session. But Harmanpreet headed to the side-lines with a throwdown specialist with just her gloves on and no pads. For an hour, she practised her drives through the ‘V’. It started with keeping the shots down the ground before going aerial. Not once did she play the sweep.
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It was reminiscent of the advice Rahul Dravid gave Kevin Pietersen in an email on how to get better at playing spin. “When you have no pads, it will force you, sometimes painfully, to get the bat forward of the pads and will force you to watch the ball. Also the legs will be less keen to push out without any protection. My coach used to tell me you should never need pads to play spin!” Dravid wrote.
At DY Patil, until the moment she got out playing a cross-batted swat that went aerial, Harmanpreet aced the run-chase. The drives and flicks flew off the bat, and once more, she had Australia scampering while she was in the zone. And this time, the knock ended in a famous win.
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