India suffered a heartbreaking early exit in the T20 World Cup 2024 as they crashed out in the group stage of the tournament. Despite being called as the best Indian team to go to a T20 World Cup by captain Harmanpreet Kaur, the Women in Blue failed to reach the knockouts for the first time since 2016.
Former Indian captain Mithali Raj has come down hard at the Indian team after their World Cup fiasco. The batting legend has analysed the team's campaign in UAE and has stated that there has been no growth in the Indian women's team in the last two to three years.
On being asked to assess the Indian team's performance in the tournament in an interview with news agency PTI, Mithali said, "If I talk about the Australia game, it was a match to win. I thought at some point we had a chance but it seemed like we were following the same template against Australia. Taking the match deep but fell short eventually. It's not working."
"I feel that in the last two, three years, I've not really seen any growth in this team, in the sense like, I mean, beating the best side is what you always prepare for but it seems like we are saturated in the sense we are beating other teams and we are pretty happy in that. Every other team has shown growth despite limited depth, a case in point being South Africa. We have not," she added.
India were placed in Group A alongside Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka but were tipped to make it to the knockouts and even to the final. However, the Women in Blue suffered a blow in the first game against New Zealand after Sophie Devine's brilliant knock on a slow Dubai wicket. Mithali shed light on the opening loss.
"Surprisingly, we took time to adjust to the slowness of the wicket. Unlike an ODI World Cup, it is a short tournament, you don't have a lot of time to adjust to the conditions. Someone like Sophie Devine was able to score that many runs against us and she is not used to playing on slow tracks. We were not quick enough to adjust," she said.
Ahead of the tournament, India had a question to answer of who will be batting at the No.3 spot. Indian head coach Amol Muzumdar had revealed that skipper Harmanpreet Kaur will herself take the spot but the team changed batters at No.3. Speaking on this, Mithali said that the Indian team has an issue of not performing in the middle overs and need to get better at it.
"We expect the openers to do well, we always expect Shafali to go big. But things have changed over the years. If both the openers go well, then we always get stuck in middle overs. That has been our story. And then we try and makeup in the end. The power play and the death overs is where we do well, but in the middle overs, we've not found ways to get better," she said.
"I was doing commentary in the Asia Cup. To be very honest, I didn't know that, what was happening. I'm sure they were aware that Asia Cup is the last series of matches that they're going to play before the World Cup. When you know that this is the last game time that you're going to have before you enter the big tournament you do at least 70 percent of your planning or 80% of your planning.
Like who your number 5 and number 6 is, these are people who would walk in a particular situation. But there it seemed they were playing only for that tournament. It didn't seem like it was anywhere closer to what we got to see in the World Cup.
We could have given more opportunities to the bench against lower-ranked teams in Asia Cup but we didn't. Why does the men's team do well? Because, immediately after a big series or a big tournament, they're trying others. If we are talking about depth then when are we giving them chances?" she said.
