Indian women’s team has done the unthinkable in the first innings of the Chennai Test against South Africa. Taking the South African bowlers to cleaners, the hosts posted a mammoth 603 runs on the board before declaring the innings. Doing that the women’s team has shattered many records. This is the highest aggregate any cricket team, be it women’s or men’s, has ever scored in a day’s play, going past Sri Lanka men’s total of 509 in Colombo against Bangladesh back in 2002. This is also the first time any team has crossed the 600 runs mark in women’s Test cricket.
The main orchestrators of this demolishing inning were Shafali Verma and Smriti Mandhana. Verma scored 205 runs striking at more than run a ball while Mandhana supported her to form a dynamic opening stand by scoring 149 runs. This partnership was not something out of the ordinary for India. Shafali and Smriti average 67 and 62 respectively in Tests and enjoy thumping oppositions for fun. Their collective average as Indian openers is also the highest for any women’s Test-playing nation. However, in this historical one-off test, which brought women’s cricket back to Chennai after nearly half a century, they played in a way that matched the occasion.
Their partnership was broken by off-spinner Delmi Tucker when her delivery found the outside edge of Mandhana’s bat. But Verma stayed and kept building the innings with the batters to come before a farcical mix-up ran her out, but not before she could get past her double hundred.
Jemimah Rodrigues, Harmanpreet Kaur, and Richa Ghosh were able to accumulate 55, 69, and 86 runs respectively to take the runs to the historical total. India declared the innings as soon as Ghosh fell to Nonkululeko Mlaba, who rapped her pads before the wickets.
The hosts did the majority of work for this 603 total on the first day when the score at the stumps read 525/4. Interestingly, they had already broken quite a few records before the first day ended. The 525 score was the highest runs any team (men’s or women’s) has ever scored in any day of a Test match.
Generally, the Chepauk pitch favors spinners aplenty and is also slower than what a batter would like. However, it was the finesse of the Indian batters that they extracted something out of a rank-turner for themselves. It merits mention here that the ball is likely to start spinning even more in the coming days, so winning the toss and batting first was a tactically sound decision by the Indian skipper Harmanpreet Kaur.
South African women were at 106 for the loss of two wickets before tea on the second day, as Sneh Rana flaunted her spin forte to hunt both the openers down. Although the visitors are up to a decent job, the piles of runs Indian batswomen have amassed are too ginormous to match. The African women have a gargantuan job ahead of them against India’s incredible bowlers on Chepauk’s unforgiving pitch while Indian women would be hoping to get things wound up quickly to etch this historic Test match as theirs.
