India lived up to expectations against a Netherlands side playing their first World Cup in twenty-six years. After putting up a mammoth 209/5 – their highest T20 World Cup total ever – India skittled out the Dutch for just 114 runs to post their biggest winning margin at the tournament ever.
Smriti Mandhana and Shafali Verma won the game with a 115-run opening partnership, with the latter showing impressive improvement. Verma has been oft criticised for not turning her fast starts into big scores, and a 55 (38) innings – despite a couple of lucky edges and drops – showed a willingness to preserve her wicket without sacrificing her strike rate.
However, the openers’ performances masked another poor outing from India’s middle order. Jemimah Rodrigues, Yastika Bhatia and Harmanpreet Kaur scored a combined 34 (26), losing their wickets cheaply despite a complete lack of both run and wicket pressure. Moreover, the loss of Shreyanka Patil to yet another injury put a dampener on the victory.
On the flip side, India were able to turn around their stuttering middle-order problems at the ODI World Cup and might easily do so again. And while her injury is devastating personally, Patil’s loss can be covered by the emergence of Shree Charani (4-19 today) and Verma (3-20) with Radha Yadav as an additional squad option.
For the Netherlands, there were few bright spots. Their bowling – and particularly Caroline de Lange’s 32-2 – was promising, but very loose. You need perfect tactics, perfect execution and a little bit of luck to beat a team as good as India, and giving away 14 wides tied one hand behind their back before the first innings was even over.
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🏃🏽♀️ Mandhana-Shafali run the wicket: IND’s openers scored 70 boundary runs in 17 balls (16×4, 1×6), and just 45 runs in the other 53 balls (non-boundary strike rate of 84.9). It’s actually a major improvement on their regular numbers; since the last World Cup, Mandhana has an NBSR of 54.5 & Verma has an NBSR of 53.4 in all T20s. They’re both in the bottom 30 percentile for running between the wickets amongst batters at the World Cup, and have the worst NBSR of everyone in India’s Top 8 apart from Yastika Bhatia. Today was a concerted effort to change their approach, and it all but won the game for India in the first 12 overs.
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🎲 The Myrthe van den Raad gamble: The Dutch “all-rounder” had only bowled 3 overs for NED since the last World Cup. Introducing her against Mandhana (136.9 SR v medium pace) and Shafali (138.8) was a gamble that seemed to backfire immediately. On the biggest stage, van den Raad fluffed her lines and bowled 6 wide deliveries in her first over. And yet, the bowler conceded just 12 runs in 12 legal balls against the IND openers – while inducing edges off both batters, and a dropped catch off Shafali. Excluding the nervy first-over wides, van den Raad would’ve finished with a team-best economy of 7.75 and just 3 boundaries conceded (one of which was another drop off Richa Ghosh!).
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🦥 Netherlands’ slow strikers: Only two Dutch batters crossed the 130 strike rate mark tonight in a chase that required an innings SR of 175; Sterre Kalis (18 off 13) and Heather Siegers (21 off 16). For the former, this was an okay day as she fell short of her career average (35.5) but struck well clear of her career strike rate (104.43). Astonishingly, that is the second highest T20I strike rate in this NED side behind H Siegers’ 119.86. The difference has only gotten starker since the last T20 World Cup – H Siegers strikes at 145.3, and no one else strikes above 114.
