Destiny’s Children

 SHAFALI VERMA is quite possibly a firm believer in kismet now. She simply has to be, for there is no other way than ‘fate’ to explain how the match-winner on the most important night of women’s cricket in this country— the 50-over World Cup final on November 2 that Harmanpreet Kaur’s India won for the very first time, making this squad the receiver of the largest prize-money in international cricket, men’s or wom­en’s, for a single tournament—wasn’t even a part of the team’s reserves when the tournament was done with its long group stage. In fact, when India qualified for the knockouts the hard way, as the last of the semifinalists, Verma was in Surat, Gujarat, playing T20 cricket for her state side, Haryana. India’s blue jersey, and 50- over cricket for that matter, seemed a step too far for the young and temperamental opening batter.

Then, Pratika Rawal, Verma’s top-order replacement in the Indian team for a while now and a centurion in the do-or-die match against New Zealand, injured her ankle and knee in India’s final group game, and wholly out of nowhere, Verma was called up as a replacement in the squad. There was still no guarantee that she would play in the semifinal, given that the 21-year-old had been out of the set-up since October last year, but her captain Kaur and coach Amol Muzumdar wanted her back (they were the same leaders who axed her in late 2024 for being too inconsistent) and there she was in Navi Mumbai, the venue for India’s climax games, facing the press a day before her possible comeback.

“No one wants any player to go through such an injury. But I believe God has sent me here to do something good,” Verma said, hinting at said kismet, only to open the innings against defending champions Australia the following day (exactly a year and a day after her previ­ous ODI) and promptly get out in the sec­ond over for yet another inconsequential score in what would grow into the biggest chase in the history of women’s ODIs. Luck, then, perhaps had just as large a role to play as the other intangible fac­tors, for Verma was retained as opener in the World Cup final against South Africa, where she went on to script not only her highest individual score of 87 in one-day cricket, but also the team’s tallest innings on the night to take them to 298 runs batting first.

While that should be enough to make her and followers of the Indian women’s team—of whom there are many now— believe in miracles, what took place next made captain Harman wholly embrace the D-word. “It was destiny,” the skipper would later say, when asked about why she tossed the ball to Verma of all people as South Af­rica looked poised to chase down the target, what with the Proteas captain and opener Laura Wolvaardt having already stitched a ballooning fifty-run stand with SA’s sheet-anchor Sune Luus. Now here’s the thing: Verma isn’t even a part-time bowler, as her comical bowling action would later suggest. Yet, with her second delivery, she had Luus caught and bowled. Then, in her following over, Verma had the dangerous Marizanne Kapp caught behind to claim two wickets that no one could ever dream of, wickets that Kaur would later call “the turning point”. “I didn’t want to go back to the room later, thinking ‘Why didn’t I try?’”

As we now know, Kaur certainly didn’t die wondering, and roughly a couple of hours later, at precisely the stroke of midnight, with the ball safely nestled in her outstretched hands at wideish cover, women’s cricket in India had its prover­bial tryst with destiny. Harman & Co were now world champions for the very first time, simultaneously ushering in a watershed moment for female cricketers all around India, quite like Kapil Dev’s World Cup-winning squad did for the men’s game back in 1983. She would later pose for a picture with the World Cup tro­phy in her hotel room bed, the winner’s cheque of US$13.88 million (far greater than US$10 million won by the winner of the men’s ODI World Cup in 2023) os­tensibly tucked away carefully. But it was the message on the back of her T-shirt that really stood out. “Cricket is EVERYONE’S game”, it read, with the words “a gentle­man’s” struck out with a visible scratch.

Cricket truly was now everyone’s game in the land that cared for the sport more than the rest, and they, the sixteen girls who wore India’s shirt in the World Cup squad, were all destiny’s children, not just leader Kaur and Verma, the Player of the Match in the final. They were all the chosen ones, regardless of the magnitude of the role they played as individuals in the tournament, right from Arundhati Reddy, who didn’t get to feature in a single game but was piv­otal in her close friend Jemimah Rodrigues believing in herself (which would pay off in the incredible semifinal), to fast bowler Amanjot Kaur, who didn’t have a great fi­nal with either bat or ball but changed the course of the game with her fielding with a direct runout of opener Tazmin Brits and the very beginning of the chase followed by a wobbling catch of centurion Wolvaardt at the very end.

Even injured Rawal, relegated to watching the final at the DY Patil Stadium from a wheelchair, cannot and was not forgotten, wheeled on to the podium by her caring teammates for the trophy presentation. Rawal, sporting her denims, may have been of­ficially out of the squad and hence not in contention for a physical medal, but her opening partner and vice-captain Smriti Mandhana garlanded her with her own ribbon-and-gold anyway. Mandhana’s 434 runs in the tournament were worth far more, perhaps even wor­thy of the World Cup’s biggest individual award, the Player of the Tournament. But that rightly went to the ever-smiling all-rounder Deepti Sharma, who finished the World Cup as the highest wicket-taker with 22 wickets, five of those recorded in the final, along with 58 of the most crucial runs scored in the middle-order.

The final wasn’t the first time Sharma had bailed India out of trouble with the bat, as 215 tournament runs would sug­gest. In India’s very first match of the cam­paign, against co-hosts Sri Lanka in Guwa­hati, Harman’s side collapsed from 120/2 to 124/6, only for Deepti’s rearguard fifty to drag them to a respectable 269/8, before she once again wrapped up the win with three Sri Lankan wickets. These crucial wins at the group stage—notched against Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand— would’ve amounted to nothing had India not found a way past the greatest women’s cricket nation of all time, Australia, in the tournament’s penultimate match. And they sure had their work cut out for them.

SINCE 1973, THE year of the first women’s World Cup, Aus­tralia has won seven out of the twelve completed editions thus far, in­cluding the last one in 2022. In the 13th edition, the defending champions, led by Alyssa Healy, went unbeaten in the group stages, the only team to do so in 2025. Then, in the semifinal, Healy’s Australia posted a score of 338 runs batting first, which meant that if India were to qualify for the home World Cup final, they would have to complete a world record chase, against the world’s greatest eleven to boot.

The chase began poorly, with Verma out leg before in the second over and Mandhana, the most in-form player in world cricket today, dismissed by the 10th. This brought together Rodrigues and Kaur, who put together not just one of the great stands ever witnessed of 167 runs for the third wicket, but a future case-study in how partnerships ought to be built. Rodrigues was the enforcer early on, with captain Kaur playing the anchor. Runs flowed from Jemimah’s bat until, perhaps due to fatigue, it didn’t. As she slowed down in her 80s, Kaur took over, bashing sixes over midwicket at ease, fast catching up with her partner’s score.

 Once Kaur was out just shy of her century in the 36th over, with well over a hundred runs to win, Rodrigues willed her tired self to take over the bulk of the run-scoring once again. It wasn’t flaw­less—catches were spilt and run out chances were missed—but she carried on, first by getting to a century that she didn’t celebrate, then with undying belief towards the final target. All that effort and prayers, not just Rodrigues’s but a na­tion’s, pulled India over the victory line with a date against South Africa for the big one. So, when the highest successful chase in the history of women’s cricket (and quite possibly the greatest too) ended at the semifinal stage of a World Cup, it did so with the protagonist falling to her padded knees and burying her face by the side of the well-worn pitch. Rodrigues, unbeaten on 127, was of course physically exhausted after having played one of the great knocks on the international stage— be it in the women’s sport or men’s.

Then she wept, and a nation wept hap­pily with her, starting with captain Kaur by the dugout, whose 89 runs had been instrumental in knocking out the seven-time champions and only unbeaten side of the World Cup so far. Yes, the physical toll of having fielded for 50 overs and having batted for 47 overs, all while an­choring the biggest chase witnessed in the game, played a big role in Rodrigues’ emotions, but the tears were mainly due to her mental fatigue, having played the knock of a lifetime all while being unsure of her place in the side as well as her posi­tion in the batting order.

In certainly the most impassioned presentation ceremony ever witnessed, a tearful Rodrigues received her Player of the Match award while talking about how she ‘was not doing well mentally, going through a lot of anxiety’ right through this long and draining World Cup campaign and also how her belief in her lord, Jesus Christ, ‘carried me through today’. “Towards the end, I was quoting one scripture from the Bible—just stand still and God will fight for you. And I just stood there and he fought for me,” she said, wiping the flow from her eyes on her blue sleeves already drenched in sweat, the front of her shirt caked in mud.

“This is not the end, this is just the beginning,” remarked India’s former captain Anjum Chopra on air, just the dose of perspective the moment needed to remind everyone that there was still a World Cup final to be played. And hope­fully won, for twice before—in 2005, with Chopra as captain, and more recently in 2017, where Kaur was leader—India had lost, on the latter occasion from the very brink of victory. So, in order not to deepen the scars of the members of this side who were present at Lord’s eight years ago, the team had a visualisation session on the eve of the final.

“It was an optional session. But most of us attended and visualised seeing us with the trophy, the celebration and the firecrackers, the words ‘India: World Cup 2025 winners’ written over the big screen,” Rodrigues said later. “That’s why when it came true, we first wondered at each oth­er—‘Are we still visualising or is this real?’”

IT IS HARD to imagine what Verma had visualised, given that everything that happened in her life in the week leading up to Sunday was nothing short of dream-like. So, she simply let it continue by providing her side with a dream start with the bat. On a wet field blanketed with overcast skies, the final began two hours late, the capacity crowd in Navi Mumbai further quietened by Kapp’s maiden opening over to Mandhana. First ball next over, Verma punctured the silence with a delicious square drive to the fence and never looked back. She danced out of her crease constantly to Ayabonga Khaka, spanking boundaries on either side of the field, before climbing into her first straight and towering six of the grey evening off Nadine de Klerk.

In what was the most eventful over of the innings, the 18th bowled by spin­ner Chloe Tryon, the Indian openers first brought up the 100-run stand— Mandhana’s third of this edition—before the left-hander got out and Verma pushed out her fiftieth run of the night. She soon went past her previous highest score of 71 in the 25th over, where another flat six off Luus took her into the 80s for the first time in her young career. This is where a visibly tired Verma would perish in the 28th over, 13 runs short of what would’ve been a well-deserved century. But she had done enough, building the right platform for all-rounder Deepti to push the score towards a near 300-run target (299), with a half-century of her own.

Verma had also done enough to inspire her captain to believe it was her day with her weaker set of skills. Or night, in this case. By the time Wolvaardt and Luus were settled into their rhythms with their bats, Kaur had tried six different bowlers in the first 20 overs, with only left-arm spinner Sree Charani striking with the ball. Thus, Kaur brought on a seventh in Verma, charging and leaping into a bear hug with the bowler the moment she had affected Luus’ dismissal. Then, to vocifer­ous chants of ‘Sha-fa-li!’ from the ground’s terraces, there was yet another uproar fol­lowed by an emotional embrace immedi­ately after the first ball of Verma’s second over, this time to celebrate the downfall of Kapp, strangled down the legside.

They were all in disbelief, be it the play­ers on the field, spectators in the stands or the wider net of India’s growing legion of women’s cricket fans, glued to their tele­vision screens. That moment of unin­hibited joy, though, was just a preview of what was to come a couple of hours later, when Kaur, with both her feet off the turf, plucked the ball out of thin air and landed on the ground a World Cup champion. As she charged off on a wild run, followed by all the delirious players and the joyfully weeping support staff, disbelief had al­together given way to blind belief. This was 12:01AM on November 3, and quite literally a new day had begun for not only Indian cricket but women’s sport all over this vast country.