Jemimah Rodrigues and Harmanpreet Kaur stood tall to take India home to one of the greatest World Cup victories for the country, regardless of gender. India beat Australia in the World Cup semifinal after pulling off the record run-chases in women’s ODIs to qualify for the final.
India beat Australia, in a run-chase of over 330, in a World Cup semi-final, coming off just three wins in seven matches in the league stage and with a monkey of past second-innings implosions sitting on the back, to defy the history and 11 inspired Australian players to qualify for the final. It took a steely knock from Jemimah Rodrigues, who notched up her career-best and became the first woman in World Cup knockouts to smash a century, and a determined 89 from skipper Harmanpreet Kaur to deliver a win and a result for the ages in the history of Indian cricket.
Jemimah, who was almost out of her breath in the latter part of her innings, was uncontrollable. “Today was not about my fifty or my hundred, about making India win. Everything that happened so far, was a setup for this,” said a teary-eyed Jemimah, who was putting effort into getting a word out of her mouth in the post-match interview. Jemimah was on the ground, on her haunches as her teammates surrounded her. A few yards down the field, there was skipper Harmanpreet Kaur, who couldn’t hold her tears back too.
Kaur quickly hugged an emotional Munish Bali, the fielding coach, and her other teammates as it was an emotion of breaking the chase jinx, getting one up over Australia in a knockout and finally being in touching distance of the elusive World Cup Trophy. This was coming and as Jemimah summed up, a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of this.
Dropped catches, overthrows, fielding lapses, freebies with the ball – India were their erratic and clumsy at best with the ball and despite taking 8/118 in the latter half of the innings, Australia had notched up 338 runs on the board. The odds were stacked against the Women in Blue; they lost their leading run-scorer of the tournament in the powerplay, don’t have the other regular opener for the remainder of the competition, changed their No 3 for the decider and boy did Jemimah deliver.
The highest-ever women’s ODI run-chase! India take on South Africa in the final as the Women’s World Cup awaits a new champion on Sunday, November 2.