Notes From the World Cup: Escape Velocity
World Cup Final, T-1
In twenty hours from now, the India women’s cricket team will step out to play a World Cup final, surrounded by more than 30,000 blue shirts at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. On Thursday, the attendance at DY Patil was 34651. Friends lucky enough to be there told me that the decibel level belied that number. It sounded like 50,000. I expect much the same tomorrow.
To call the game momentous would be to call the Everest a hill. Yes, it’s is all about the golden trophy, but in so many ways, it’s is about much more than one golden trophy.
Tomorrow is about the gravelly, rocky, prickly road travelled to land at the golden gates. Tomorrow is about Harmanpreet’s journey from 2009, Deepti Sharma’s playlist of heartbreaks, Jemimah’s tears and anxiety and belief, Amanjot’s grandmother, Pratika Rawal’s father, Kranti Goud’s village, and Smriti Mandhana’s quiet, dignified quest for greatness. Tomorrow is nothing like anything we’ve known so far.
When Harmanpreet Kaur scored 171 not out at Derby in 2017, to take India to a World Cup final, it seemed like the world was tilting. Women’s cricket would no longer be a side-thing for Indians. The final at Lord’s, three days later, was sold out before the semi-final was done. A ceiling had definitely broken that day.
We have since taken more steps forward than back. The BCCI has set a running example of how not to run women’s sport, but somehow, we’ve found players who’ve beaten all sorts of barricades to create their own paths and forced the administrators to keep up.
“The girls who watched Derby as dreamers are now professionals, products of academies that didn’t exist before Harman’s rebellion,” Prem writes here. “They play under lights, for franchises, before crowds that chant their names. They talk of game awareness, workload management, mental health — once the preserve of the men’s team.”
Tomorrow is about hitting escape velocity, for the spaceship to hit the stratosphere and not have to fight gravity anymore. Ask the previous generation’s male cricketers, and they’ll say, in chorus, that the 1983 World Cup win made them want to play cricket for India.
We are at the doorstep of that moment. And we’ve reached here after many, many heartbreaks. It was poetic that the two stars of the semi-final were Harmanpreet Kaur and Jemimah Rodrigues.
Harmanpreet is playing her fifth, and undoubtedly last, ODI World Cup. She’s seen World Cup semi-finals and finals and group stage losses and Commonwealth medals. The only thing she’s not seen is a gold medal. She’s been a rockstar and an anchor. And, somehow, at 37, she’s found some vintage touch at the big tournament. Watch her from Thursday’s semi-final and tell me some of those shots don’t make your knees wobble.
A 16-year-old Jemimah Rodrigues had gone to the Mumbai Airport to receive Harmanpreet and co. after the 2017 World Cup. The team had wrested defeat from the jaws of triumph in the final, but that didn’t mean that a silver medal couldn’t be celebrated.
By the next World Cup, in 2022, Jemimah was one of India’s key X-factor players, someone who could change a game from nowhere. And then, she was inexplicably dropped from the World Cup squad.
In 2024, the Khar Gymkhana, one of the oldest clubs in Mumbai, cancelled Jemimah’s membership after allegations about her father, Ivan, using the club premises for “conversions”. Like The Wire reported here, the club president had denied all allegations from the get-go. The damage had already been done. A national news agency ran a fake news campaign, to massive reception and amplification through India’s buzzing right-wing IT cell.
In October 2025, Jemimah was in India’s World Cup squad. But she was no more the X-factor. The team management almost didn’t know how to profile her. They dropped her for the game against England. All of this had taken a toll on her, she’d tell us on Thursday night. She’d spent the entire past month crying, sometimes in private, other times in the comfort of a phone line or a friend’s shoulder.
With India eight runs away from a spot in the final, Jemimah crouched down at the non-striker’s end. She was reciting a scripture from the Bible, asking her God to light up the path home. She had scored 127 unbeaten runs in the semi-final against the greatest team to ever play the sport, after a month of soul-crushing turmoil.
Like Sharda Ugra writes here, if this is not a team worth rooting for, which one is? So tomorrow, sit back, and give them your throat and body. The DY Patil will make 30,000 sound like 100,000.
Also, there’s more than one story at play here. South Africa, too, are chasing their first World Cup. You wouldn’t begrudge Laura Wolvaardt or Tazmin Brits winning anything. To be honest, you’d pay to watch Wolvaardt bat - anytime, anywhere.
We made a mistake in November 2023. We got so emotionally invested in the men’s team, so captivated by their cricket, we forgot about the team standing opposite us in the final. We should 100% make the same mistake this time. Wolvaardt poetry can be kept in the bookmarks folder for now. Tomorrow is about the stories we’ve seen from thirty metres away.
Go on, Harman and co. Make this your 1983.
Your writing makes the grace in sport come alive , and the way you shape the players persona is riveting. I love sport but I read you also to learn how to write.
Sohini writes about women and sport in "the Day I became a runner ",a celebration of an arduous struggle of all women in the field of sport and their stellar achievements.She would be most pleased reading your piece coming from a male if she hasn't already.
You'd be happy to know that your girls have done well and made all including the naysayers proud.The wheel is turning.
The irony is in a country that has the least respect or understanding of what women are it can happen - the extraordinary miracle.