A couple of months after Rohit Sharma & Co ended India’s decade-long title drought by lifting the T20 World Cup trophy in Barbados on June 29, the country’s women’s team find themselves on the same road, and skipper Harmanpreet Kaur wants her side to draw inspiration from their male counterparts to ensure the joy is doubled when they turn out for the women’s T20 World Cup in the UAE in October.
While the men’s team won the title after 17 years and lifted an ICC trophy after 11 years, the women’s outfit is yet to lift the T20 World Cup, and came close in the 2020 edition, when they were runners-up in Australia.
“We have been really inspired by the men’s team, the way they won the T20 World Cup this year. They worked really hard for this trophy and won some tough matches. We need to learn how they maintained their body language for such matches and how they approached such games,” Harmanpreet said at an event in the national capital.
“We’re on the same road now and getting ready for our World Cup campaign. The team is working really hard and our attempt will be to give our country and fans another opportunity to celebrate this year,” she added.
Over the past few years, the Indian team has consistently made it to the knockout stages of global tournaments, having reached the ODI World Cup final in 2017, when they lost by just nine runs at Lord’s, before going down to Australia in the T20 World Cup final in 2020, and two years later they again lost to Australia, also by nine runs, in the final of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
In last year’s T20 World Cup, India went down to Australia in the semi-final, by just five runs, and when they were the favourites to win the Asia Cup in the T20 format last month, they were beaten comprehensively by a much lower-ranked Sri Lanka.
Harmanpreet believes that each team brings a new set of challenges during a World Cup, and thus no team can be taken lightly, nor overestimated at the same time.
For the upcoming T20 World Cup in the UAE, India are in Group A with Australia, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Pakistan. Their first three matches will be in Dubai, before they take on Australia in Sharjah.
“The World Cup is a kind of tournament for which all teams prepare differently. So no team can be taken lightly and similarly no team should be overestimated either,” she said.
“Bilateral series have a different kind of pressure and for World Cups there is pressure as well as expectations and hopes of fans. We are working extremely hard to live up to those expectations, we have been holding camps where all players are working hard. We have also worked on the mistakes we made the last time. Now we’re ready with a positive mindset,” added Harmanpreet.
The T20 World Cup will start on October 3 in Sharjah with two matches on the opening day. India will begin their campaign on October 4 against New Zealand, before taking on Pakistan on October 6, Sri Lanka on October 9 and Australia on October 13.
After the round-robin stage, the top two teams from each group will play the semi-finals on October 17 and 18, and the final is scheduled for October 20 in Dubai. Both semi-finals and the final have been allotted a reserve day, unlike at the men’s T20 World Cup in June where the semi-final involving India wasn’t allotted a reserve day. All teams will play two warm-up fixtures each from September 28 to October 3 to acclimatise.