Head coach Amol Muzumdar pointed to an inexperienced bowling attack and a restrained batting approach after India fell short in a do-or-die encounter against Australia
Batting collapses, patchy bowling, and costly fielding errors. India head coach Amol Muzumdar identified failures across all three departments throughout the tournament as the key reasons behind their exit from the Women’s T20 World Cup, after a six-wicket defeat to Australia knocked them out in the league stage.
Needing a win at Lord’s on Sunday, India batted first and put up 170 for 4, a total Muzumdar described as “par.” Australia overhauled it with six wickets in hand and six balls remaining, plundering 63 runs off the final 30 deliveries.
India had Australia under some pressure at the halfway mark, picking up three wickets in the first ten overs. But the game slipped away sharply once Ellyse Perry and Ashleigh Gardner took charge, repeatedly finding the boundary off the spinners. While India managed just four overs where they scored ten or more runs, Australia racked up nine such overs including a devastating four-over burst between the 15th and 18th that dragged the required rate from 10.33 down to just 2.50.
“If I have to pinpoint things across the entire tournament, bowling and fielding are the areas we really need to address,” Muzumdar said. “We could also have been a touch more aggressive with the bat; perhaps 15 to 20 extra runs might have made a difference. But our bowling attack has been very inexperienced at the international level. I’ve said it before: give us 18 months and this will be a completely different attack.”
India’s catching, to their credit, held up well against Australia, a marked improvement from their game against South Africa, where they grassed three chances off Marizanne Kapp, a lapse that effectively ended their qualification hopes. Across the league phase, India shelled 10 catches in total, the third-highest tally in the tournament, behind England and New Zealand who each dropped 12.
The pace attack lacked any sense of consistency, with the combination changing before every game. India never fielded the same seam unit in consecutive matches. Nandani Sharma and Kranti Gaud each played three games, while Renuka Singh and Arundhati Reddy featured in two apiece. Nandani was the standout among the seamers with three wickets at an economy of 8.69 but was left out of the Australia game. Reddy and Gaud went through the entire tournament without a single wicket between them.
The numbers paint a damning picture: India conceded at 7.43 runs per over across the tournament, a worse return than all four semi-finalists Australia (6.21), South Africa (6.93), England (7.23), and West Indies (7.36).
The batting, too, never clicked as a unit. Middle-order collapses were a recurring theme across their first four games. In the must-win match against Australia, India never truly accelerated after a measured opening stand of 66 from 9.1 overs. It was Harmanpreet Kaur’s blistering 56 off 27 balls that rescued India, with 36 runs coming off the final two overs. The question that lingers: could they have pushed harder from the outset?
“Yes, we could have,” Muzumdar admitted. “After any defeat, you always wish you had banked another 10 or 15 runs. The powerplay didn’t go our way, perhaps another 10 to 15 runs there could have changed things. But we hadn’t lost a wicket at that stage, so we were in a decent position. Australia chased it down very well; they were three wickets down at the ten-over mark too.”
One persistent headache for India was the No. 3 slot occupied by Yastika Bhatia, whose presence pushed the more experienced Jemimah Rodrigues down the order to No. 5. On Sunday, India chose not to field Bhatia at all and instead promoted Deepti Sharma late in the innings, a clear signal that Bhatia was not in her best form. The uncertainty over whether Bhatia or Bharti Fulmali should fill that middle-order slot had disrupted the batting structure from the start of the tournament. Bhatia ended her World Cup campaign with just 41 runs across three innings at an average of 13.66.
With a batting line-up that never found its rhythm and a pace attack that rotated too frequently to build any momentum, it was always going to be difficult for the spin-heavy unit which accounted for 29 of India’s 34 tournament wickets to carry the side on its own. In the end, a tournament of missed opportunities concluded exactly as the performances suggested it would.
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