The Indian players celebrate a South Africa wicket in Navi Mumbai. (Express photo by Narendra Vaskar)
More out of desperation than by design, Harmanpreet Kaur hurled the ball in the direction of Shafali Verma. Until last week, she was in Surat with the Haryana team and was SOS-ed into the team only because of an injury to Pratika Rawal, one of the stars of India’s World Cup.
Now, under a sky heavy with tension, the 21-year-old — who scored a blistering 87 earlier in the day — faced a far crueler test. Laura Wolvaardt and Sune Luus were strangling India’s chances. With the match slipping out of their grasp, Harmanpreet turned to Shafali — the last, unlikely hope to turn the tide. She did that, and more.
In two consecutive overs, Shafali picked two wickets that broke South Africa’s resistance and swung the momentum back in India’s favour. A couple of hours later, the Indian players — who held nerves to beat South Africa by 52 runs and win their first-ever World Cup — held aloft the trophy and every doubt dissolved into confetti.
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Just like that, decades of hurt were over. And in images that had uncanny resemblance to the 1983 men’s final, it was the India captain running backwards to take a catch that proved to be the ultimate winning moment. This moment, no less momentous.
This World Cup wasn’t India’s most dominant campaign — it was their most human. The players were unafraid to show their vulnerability off the field. On it, they stumbled early, scraped through tight finishes, and carried the kind of pressure that has broken teams before them.
Yet this time, when the collapse loomed, someone always stood up, and the fans — from Guwahati to Vizag, Indore to Navi Mumbai — were given a new name to sing, a new chant to belt out every time.
Shafali, the fearless teenager from Rohtak who cut her hair short just to sneak into boys’ nets, batted as though the world owed her one final explosion. Deepti Sharma, the meticulous all-rounder from Agra who once travelled twelve kilometres each day just to train and now has a street in the city of the Taj named after her, anchored chaos with discipline. Amanjot Kaur, the unassuming 25-year-old who wasn’t allowed to play by the boys in her neighbourhood and whose father endured taunts, lit up the field with a sparkling run out and the match-winning catch of Wolvaardt. And Richa Ghosh, still barely out of her teens, from the cricket-bare streets of Siliguri, kept smiling through every crisis, turning pressure into theatre; her nonchalant big-hitting propelling India to a defendable total in Sunday’s final.
Together, they didn’t just win a World Cup; they rewrote the story of what Indian cricket could look like: bold, unafraid, and finally complete. On a night that felt bigger than victory, the women who once had to ask for space on dusty practice grounds lifted the most coveted trophy in the sport. And for the first time, the country didn’t compare — it erupted in unison.
In 2013, the last time India hosted the women’s ODI World Cup, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, shifted the matches from the Wankhede Stadium to a modest ground with no seating capacity in Bandra because it wanted to host the Ranji Trophy final at the iconic venue.
On Sunday, more than 35,000 fans — children, women and men — clad in blue filled the stands of the DY Patil Stadium to capacity long before the first ball was bowled to watch Harmanpreet & Co. do what no Indian team had done before.
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This triumph wasn’t stitched together in academies with floodlights or manicured outfields. It was built in small towns, on uneven pitches, by girls who refused to stop dreaming when cricket itself refused to look their way.
The journey of Harmanpreet — forever the bridge between the generation that begged for opportunities and the one that expects them — from Punjab’s backyard games to this World Cup trophy is the story of Indian women’s cricket in miniature — improvisation, endurance, and the relentless urge to be taken seriously. She led like someone who knew that history had already taken too long; tonight was an exorcism of past heartbreaks — in 2017 and 2020, 2023. Jemimah’s rise, polished yet quietly stubborn, became the symbol of what a professional Indian woman cricketer could look like: confident, self-contained, unafraid of the camera or the scoreboard.
If the men’s game grew on infrastructure and institutional support, the women’s grew on intent. For years, they played in front of empty stands, often without live broadcasts, training for a spotlight that might never arrive. But when it finally did — on a rain-soaked day when the start was delayed by two hours — they were ready.
What this win does for Indian women’s cricket goes beyond the trophy cabinet. It rewires perception. For decades, the women’s game was a polite side story to the men’s spectacle — inspiring, yes, but peripheral. Tonight, as Rohit Sharma and Sachin Tendulkar watched from the stands, it stands on equal footing, perhaps even stealing the emotional core of Indian sport for a generation that wants new heroes.
On that stage under the bright lights, when Harmanpreet lifted the trophy and Smriti wiped a tear, it wasn’t just history being made — it was balance being restored. The women who were once footnotes became the headline. The sport that once overlooked them now belongs to them.
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