Well done, skipp!

In the world of sport, few moments are as poignant as a great leader choosing the time and manner of their own exit. On October 6, 2026, Harmanpreet Kaur did exactly that. In a heartfelt Instagram post, the 37-year-old announced that she was stepping down as captain of the Indian women's cricket team across all formats, with immediate effect.

It is important to note that this is not a retirement. Harmanpreet made it abundantly clear that she will continue to play for India. Her own words captured the moment perfectly: "Captaincy ends. The journey continues."

The timing of the announcement is striking, and in many ways, deeply symbolic. Just two weeks earlier, on September 22, she had led India to a second consecutive Asian Games gold medal in Nisshin, Japan. Barely a fortnight before that, India had reclaimed the Women's Asia Cup in Dubai. And less than a year before that, in November 2025, she had lifted the trophy that had eluded Indian women's cricket for nearly five decades: the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup.

Very few captains get to leave on such a high. Yet Harmanpreet's departure was not simply a victory lap. It came a day after a BCCI review meeting in Guwahati, held in the shadow of a disappointing group-stage exit at the ICC Women's T20 World Cup in England earlier in the year.

In this blog, I will explore:

• How Harmanpreet's captaincy began and evolved over more than a decade
• The challenges, controversies and criticism she faced along the way
• The historic 2025 World Cup triumph and what it meant for the nation
• The setback of 2026, and the remarkable response that followed
• The Asia Cup and Asian Games victories that closed her tenure
• Her enduring legacy, and what comes next for Indian women's cricket

Let's dive in.

From Moga to the Armband: How the Journey Began

To truly understand the impact of Harmanpreet Kaur's captaincy, we must first understand where she came from. Born on March 8, 1989, in Moga, Punjab, Harmanpreet took up the game at the Gian Jyoti School Academy, roughly 30 kilometres from her home, under the guidance of coach Kamaldeesh Singh Sodhi. She made her ODI debut against Pakistan in March 2009 and her T20I debut against England a few months later.

Her leadership journey began earlier than many remember. In 2012, she led India for the first time in a T20 Asia Cup match against Pakistan in Guangzhou. It was a one-off at the time, but it offered an early glimpse of what was to come.

The real turning point came in 2016. In a move that surprised many, the women's selection committee appointed Harmanpreet, then vice-captain, as India's T20I captain, while Mithali Raj retained the ODI and Test captaincy. For the first time, India had different captains for different formats. It was, in effect, Indian women's cricket's first genuine attempt at a succession plan.

The Innings That Changed Everything

Then came Derby, July 2017. In the semi-final of the ICC Women's World Cup against defending champions Australia, Harmanpreet produced one of the greatest innings in the history of the women's game: an unbeaten 171 off just 115 balls. It was a breathtaking display of power and audacity that sent India into the final at Lord's.

India narrowly lost that final to England. But the impact of that innings extended far beyond a single match. It transformed Harmanpreet from a talented cricketer into a national icon, and it transformed women's cricket in India from a niche interest into a mainstream conversation. Young girls across the country began picking up bats because of what they had seen that day.

Taking Full Charge

The final pieces of the leadership puzzle fell into place over the next few years:

• 2016: Appointed full-time T20I captain
• 2022: Took over as ODI captain following Mithali Raj's retirement in June, beginning with a tour of Sri Lanka where she was named Player of the Series in the ODIs
• 2023: Named all-format captain, including Tests

By the time she was fully in charge, Harmanpreet had become the face of a new, more aggressive Indian team. Where Mithali Raj was known for her calm, measured approach, Harmanpreet brought fire, emotion and a willingness to take the game on.

Navigating the Storm: The Lean Years and Relentless Scrutiny

It would be a mistake to portray Harmanpreet's captaincy as a smooth, uninterrupted ascent. In reality, her tenure was marked by near-misses, painful defeats and intense public criticism.

So Close, Yet So Far

Under her leadership, India were consistently competitive in global tournaments, but the final step often proved elusive:

• 2018 T20 World Cup: Reached the semi-finals
• 2020 T20 World Cup: Reached the final in Melbourne, losing to Australia in front of a massive crowd at the MCG
• 2022 Commonwealth Games: Won a silver medal after a close final against Australia in Birmingham
• 2023 T20 World Cup: Reached the semi-finals, losing narrowly to Australia once again
• 2024 T20 World Cup: Exited at the group stage in the UAE

The pattern was frustrating. India were good enough to reach the business end of tournaments, but Australia repeatedly stood in their way. For critics, this became evidence that the team lacked a killer instinct, and some placed the blame squarely at the captain's feet.

Controversy and Criticism

Harmanpreet's emotional, combative style also landed her in trouble. In July 2023, following a heated ODI in Bangladesh, her on-field outburst and post-match remarks resulted in a two-match suspension. The ban meant she missed India's early matches at the Hangzhou Asian Games, only returning for the knockout stages.

She also faced persistent questions about her form. Back in February 2022, former India captain Diana Edulji called for her to be dropped, arguing that she could not keep surviving on the strength of her 2017 semi-final heroics. After the 2024 T20 World Cup exit, reports suggested the BCCI was weighing a leadership change.

Even after her greatest triumph, the debate refused to go away. Following the 2025 World Cup win, former captain Shantha Rangaswamy publicly suggested that Harmanpreet should step down to focus on her batting, recommending Smriti Mandhana as captain across formats. Former India captain Anjum Chopra pushed back sharply, pointing out the irony that critics demanded Harmanpreet's removal whether India won or lost.

Resilience as a Defining Trait

What stands out from these years is not the criticism itself, but how Harmanpreet responded to it. She never withdrew from the spotlight. She continued to lead with conviction, back her players and build a team that would eventually go on to make history. In hindsight, these lean years laid the foundation for everything that followed.

November 2025: The Night India Finally Conquered the World

If there is one moment that will define Harmanpreet Kaur's captaincy for generations to come, it is the night of November 2, 2025, at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. On that night, India won the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup for the very first time.

A Campaign on the Brink

What makes this triumph so extraordinary is how close it came to never happening. Midway through the league stage, India's campaign was in serious jeopardy. Consecutive defeats to South Africa, Australia and England left the hosts staring at an early exit, and the familiar criticism of Harmanpreet's leadership returned with full force.

This is where her captaincy truly came into its own. Rather than panicking, the team regrouped. A must-win victory over New Zealand secured a place in the semi-finals, and the momentum began to shift.

The Semi-Final for the Ages

In the semi-final, India faced seven-time champions Australia, the team that had broken Indian hearts so many times before. Australia posted a daunting 338. Very few gave India a chance.

What followed was one of the greatest chases in the history of the sport. Jemimah Rodrigues produced a majestic unbeaten 127, and Harmanpreet herself contributed a vital 89, the two building a partnership that turned the impossible into reality. India chased down the target, ending Australia's dominance and booking a place in the final.

For Harmanpreet, there was a beautiful symmetry to it. Eight years after her own 171 had stunned Australia in a World Cup semi-final, she was once again at the heart of an Indian victory over the same opponents on the same stage.

The Final

In the final against South Africa, India batted first and posted 298 for 7. Shafali Verma, who had come into the squad as an injury replacement, played a fearless innings of 87, while Deepti Sharma added a crucial half-century.

South Africa's captain Laura Wolvaardt fought valiantly with a century, but India's bowlers held their nerve. Deepti Sharma claimed five wickets, and Shafali chipped in with two of her own. Fittingly, it was Harmanpreet who held the catch that sealed the victory, a moment she later admitted she had never imagined would fall to her.

India won by 52 runs. After decades of heartbreak, including the agonising final defeats of 2005 and 2017, the wait was finally over.

Why This Win Matters So Much

The significance of this triumph cannot be overstated:

• Historic first: It was India's maiden Women's World Cup title
• Elite company: Harmanpreet became only the third Indian captain to win a 50-over World Cup, joining Kapil Dev and MS Dhoni
• National recognition: She was later awarded the Padma Shri in 2026
• Inspiration: The victory is expected to inspire a new generation of girls to take up the sport, much as 2017 did, but on an even larger scale

In many ways, the World Cup win was the culmination of everything Harmanpreet had worked for since that famous afternoon in Derby.

A Setback in England: The 2026 T20 World Cup

Sport has a way of humbling even its greatest champions. Less than a year after the World Cup triumph, India travelled to England for the ICC Women's T20 World Cup in June 2026 with high expectations. The tournament did not go to plan.

Defeats to South Africa and Australia in the group stage meant India failed to reach the knockouts. It was the second consecutive T20 World Cup under Harmanpreet's leadership in which India fell at the first hurdle.

What Went Wrong

Post-tournament analysis pointed to several contributing factors:

• Fielding lapses: India reportedly dropped around 10 catches during the tournament, one of the worst tallies of any team
• Injuries: Key players, including all-rounder Amanjot Kaur and off-spinner Shreyanka Patil, were sidelined
• Middle-order struggles: Harmanpreet herself found it difficult to provide either stability or acceleration through the middle overs
• Batting order uncertainty: Frequent reshuffles, including moving Yastika Bhatia up and down the order, unsettled the line-up

There was one silver lining. Despite the early exit, India qualified for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics as the highest-placed Asian team in the tournament.

The Captaincy Under the Microscope Again

Predictably, the exit reignited the debate about Harmanpreet's future. Many observers felt that a reset was inevitable. Yet when the selectors named the squad for the Asian Games on June 30, 2026, they placed their trust in the captain once more, retaining Harmanpreet as skipper with Smriti Mandhana as her deputy. The only change from the World Cup squad was the inclusion of 17-year-old wicketkeeper G Kamalini in place of Yastika Bhatia.

The message was clear: Harmanpreet had one more chance to show what her team could do. What followed would turn out to be a fitting final chapter.

Redemption in Dubai: The Women's Asia Cup 2026

If the T20 World Cup exposed India's vulnerabilities, the Women's Asia Cup in September 2026 showcased their resilience. India went through the entire tournament unbeaten, reclaiming the continental crown in emphatic fashion.

A Dominant Campaign

India's path to the final was a statement of intent from start to finish:

• vs Thailand: A commanding 94-run victory to open the campaign
• vs Pakistan: India bowled Pakistan out for just 55 and chased the target in 8.4 overs, winning by seven wickets
• Semi-final vs Bangladesh: On a tricky surface, India posted 149 for 6 and restricted Bangladesh to 109 for 7, winning by 40 runs. Late hitting from Richa Ghosh and Harmanpreet Kaur proved crucial, before the spinners took control

The Final: Avenging 2024

The final on September 13 at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium carried added significance. Sri Lanka were the defending champions, having beaten India in the 2024 final on home soil. For Harmanpreet's team, this was an opportunity for redemption.

They seized it with both hands. After winning the toss and electing to bat, India's openers produced a record-breaking display:

• Shafali Verma smashed 68 off 39 balls, including a 24-ball half-century, the fastest in Women's Asia Cup history
• Smriti Mandhana added a composed 59
• The pair put on 129 for the first wicket, the highest opening partnership in Women's Asia Cup history
• A late flourish from young G Kamalini helped India finish on 183 for 5

In reply, Sri Lanka never recovered from Kranti Gaud's first-over strike. Shree Charani was outstanding with 4 for 20, while Deepti Sharma took 3 for 19, sealing the match with a wicket off the final ball. Sri Lanka were bowled out for 111, and India won by 72 runs.

What the Asia Cup Victory Meant

The win delivered India a record-extending eighth Women's Asia Cup title. More importantly, it demonstrated that the team had responded to adversity in exactly the right way. The fielding was sharper, the batting more assured and the bowling more disciplined. President Droupadi Murmu congratulated the team for winning every match and making the country proud.

For Harmanpreet, it was proof that the team she had built could bounce back stronger. And the best was still to come.

Golden Farewell: The Asian Games 2026

The final assignment of Harmanpreet Kaur's captaincy took place at the Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin, Japan, as part of the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games. On September 22, 2026, India once again faced Sri Lanka, this time with a gold medal on the line.

It was a rematch of both the Asia Cup final just nine days earlier and the 2023 Asian Games final in Hangzhou, where India had won by 19 runs. Psychologically, India held a clear advantage. On the field, they turned that advantage into total domination.

A Record-Breaking Performance

India won the toss and chose to bat first. What followed was a batting masterclass:

• Smriti Mandhana set the tone with a blistering 79
• Shafali Verma added 48
• Richa Ghosh finished unbeaten on 49 with a late assault
• India posted 216 for 3, featuring 18 fours and 13 sixes

This total was historic on several fronts. It was the highest team score in Asian Games women's cricket, surpassing the 202 for 4 that Hong Kong had made against Mongolia in 2023. It was also reported as the highest total ever recorded in a women's T20 final.

Spin Seals the Deal

If the batting was spectacular, the bowling was ruthless. India's spinners strangled the Sri Lankan innings, sharing nine wickets between them:

• Deepti Sharma: 3 for 6
• Shree Charani: 2 for 13
• Shreyanka Patil: 2 for 9
• Shafali Verma: 2 for 3

Sri Lanka were bowled out for just 69 in 15.4 overs. Only Chamari Athapaththu, with 29, offered meaningful resistance. India won by a massive 147 runs.

More Than a Medal

The victory carried significance well beyond cricket:

• It was India's first gold medal of the 2026 Asian Games
• It marked a second consecutive Asian Games gold in women's cricket
• It completed a remarkable run of three consecutive final wins over Sri Lanka across the two Asian Games and the Asia Cup

Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the achievement as splendid, while Sachin Tendulkar and others joined the chorus of congratulations. Mandhana told AFP that it felt amazing to deliver India's first gold, having watched other athletes do it on television.

For Harmanpreet, the gold medal provided the perfect bookend to her leadership. Just as importantly, the performances of Mandhana, Shafali, Richa, Deepti and the young spinners showed that she was handing over a team in excellent health.

The Legacy: Measuring Harmanpreet Kaur's Impact

How do we measure the impact of a captain? Numbers tell part of the story, but only part. Harmanpreet's true legacy lies in a combination of results, culture and inspiration.

What do the numbers say?

Format	Matches as captain
Tests	5
ODIs	51 (30 wins)
T20Is	155
Total	211

Alongside these numbers sit the trophies: the 2025 ICC Women's Cricket World Cup, two Asian Games gold medals (2023 and 2026), Women's Asia Cup titles including the 2026 crown, and a Commonwealth Games silver in 2022. In franchise cricket, she also captained Mumbai Indians to two Women's Premier League titles.

Beyond the Scorecard

Harmanpreet's influence extends far beyond statistics. Several key themes define her impact:

1. A culture of fearlessness. Harmanpreet brought an aggressive, attacking mindset to Indian women's cricket. The batting approach on display in 2026, from Shafali's record-breaking fifty to India's 216 in Nisshin, reflects a team that has learned to take the game on.

2. Backing young talent. Under her leadership, a new generation of players emerged and flourished, including Shafali Verma, Richa Ghosh, Jemimah Rodrigues, Shree Charani, Kranti Gaud and G Kamalini. Her willingness to trust youth helped build depth for the future.

3. Belief in big moments. For years, India were seen as a team that faltered under pressure. The 2025 semi-final chase against Australia and the World Cup final changed that narrative decisively.

4. A symbol for a generation. From Derby in 2017 to Navi Mumbai in 2025, Harmanpreet has been the face of Indian women's cricket's rise. Countless young girls have taken up the sport because of her.

5. Grace under fire. Perhaps most impressively, she continued to lead with conviction despite relentless criticism. Her ability to absorb pressure and keep moving forward is a lesson in resilience.

An Honest Assessment

Of course, no legacy is without its imperfections. Her T20 World Cup record, with group-stage exits in 2024 and 2026, remains a blemish. Tactical decisions were sometimes questioned, and her emotional style occasionally spilled over into controversy. A balanced assessment must acknowledge these shortcomings. Yet they do not diminish the magnitude of what she achieved.

Passing the Torch: What Comes Next

Harmanpreet's decision followed a BCCI review meeting, chaired by BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia and attended by Harmanpreet, vice-captain Smriti Mandhana and head coach Amol Muzumdar. Mandhana is the likely successor, with the leadership question expected to be settled ahead of the home series against Zimbabwe beginning on October 16.

Mandhana would inherit a team in excellent shape. India are world champions in the 50-over format, Asian champions in T20 cricket, back-to-back Asian Games gold medallists and already qualified for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The core of the side, including Mandhana, Shafali, Richa, Jemimah and Deepti, is entering its prime, while young talents like Shree Charani, Kranti Gaud and G Kamalini offer exciting depth.

Crucially, Harmanpreet herself will remain in the dressing room. In her statement, she confirmed she would continue to be available for India in all formats. Freed from the burden of leadership, she may well rediscover the batting form that once made her the most feared hitter in the women's game. And her experience will be invaluable to a new captain finding her feet.

Conclusion: A Captaincy That Changed Indian Cricket

Harmanpreet Kaur's captaincy was never simple. It was a story of soaring highs and painful lows, of fierce criticism and quiet resilience, of near-misses that eventually gave way to history.

She leaves the role as one of the most successful and influential captains Indian cricket has ever produced. She delivered India's first Women's World Cup, defended an Asian Games gold, reclaimed the Asia Cup and, above all, transformed the way an entire nation views women's cricket.

As she put it herself: "Captaincy may end today, but my love for Indian cricket never will." For millions of fans, that love is mutual. The armband has changed hands, but Harmanpreet Kaur's journey, and her impact, will continue for many years to come.
Jai Ho!

From auto-rickshaws to trophy parades: The improbable but unstoppable rise of India's Women in Blue

There is a certain irony in the fact that Indian women's cricket owes its official birth not to a boardroom decision or a benevolent grant, but to a man riding around Lucknow in an auto-rickshaw with a hand-held microphone, hollering an invitation that must have sounded, in 1973, like a fairly outlandish joke: "Kanyaon ki cricket hogi, zaroor aaiye" — girls will play cricket, do come. That man was Mahendra Kumar Sharma, who had been organizing softball and handball tournaments for schoolgirls in Lucknow, and who noticed at a softball meet in Hyderabad that the girls, having watched some boys play, had started swinging the softball bats at an imaginary cricket ball instead. thebetterindia

That small, almost accidental spark is where this story really begins — not with Harmanpreet Kaur lifting a trophy in Navi Mumbai fifty-two years later, though we will get there, but with a man nobody remembers organizing a tournament that almost nobody attended. Sharma's Women's Cricket Association of India was formally registered under the Societies Act in Lucknow in 1973, with around 200 curious onlookers showing up for the first tournament at Queen's Anglo Sanskrit College. Two hundred people. For context, more than that will show up for a decent under-14 school match today. But that gathering — half novelty show, half genuine sporting ambition — was the seed of everything that has followed: the Test caps, the World Cup final heartbreaks, the eventual, thunderous triumph, and the crores now changing hands at a glittering annual auction in a Mumbai convention centre. Wikipedia

This is an attempt to tell that fuller story — not just the highlight reel everyone already knows, but the parts that tend to get left out of the montage: the women who played for nothing, the administrators who mattered more than history gave them credit for, and the quietly extraordinary depth Indian cricket has built that now allows it to genuinely stand toe to toe with cricket's oldest women's powers.

The Prehistory: Before the softball bats

Sharma's WCAI is usually cited as the true starting gun, but women's cricket in India didn't spring from nothing in 1973. There was already a women's cricket club in Bombay — the Albees Cricket Club, started in 1969 by Aloo Bamjee and her husband — a lonely outpost of the sport in a country where a girl holding a cricket bat was, at best, an eccentricity and, at worst, a scandal. This detail rarely makes it into the popular telling, perhaps because Bombay's Albees never grew into a movement the way Lucknow's initiative eventually did. But it matters, because it tells you something the folklore glosses over: the appetite for the game among Indian women predates any organization by years, possibly decades. The administrators didn't create the desire to play. They just finally noticed it. greenportfolio

Once the WCAI existed, the growth was almost startling in its speed — the first Women's Inter-State Nationals in Pune in April 1973 had just three teams (Bombay, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh); by the end of that same year, the Varanasi edition had eight; soon after, fourteen. Two women, Chandra Tripathi and Pramilabai Chavan, took over as chairperson and president in this period and, alongside Sharma, effectively willed a domestic structure into existence out of pure administrative stubbornness. Railways and Air India began fielding their own women's teams, offering players something almost nobody else could: a salary, and by extension, permission from their families to keep playing. shethepeopleshethepeople

That last point deserves lingering on, because it is the quietest and most consequential thread running through the entire early history of the sport. A government job with Indian Railways or Air India wasn't just an income. For a young woman in the 1970s and '80s wanting to play a sport her own society considered faintly improper, a stable job was often the only argument that could out-shout a disapproving father or a skeptical mother-in-law. Cricket didn't just need bats and grounds. It needed employers willing to gamble a payroll slot on a girl who could bowl leg-spin.

India's first official Test cricket came in 1975, when an Australian under-25 team toured for a three-match series — one at Pune, one at Delhi, one at Calcutta — with the captaincy split, unusually, across three different women for the three matches: Ujwala Nikam, Sudha Shah, and Shreeroopa Bose. India's own first international fixture is generally recorded as 31 October 1976, a Test against the West Indies at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, which ended in a draw. There was no television coverage worth the name. There was barely a paragraph in the papers the next morning. But it happened, and it happened only because a handful of people had spent three years building the scaffolding for it to be possible at all. espncricinfoWikipedia

The torchbearers: Playing for love, Paying from pocket

Every retelling of Indian women's cricket eventually arrives at the same names — Shantha Rangaswamy, Diana Edulji, Sudha Shah, and a little later, Anjum Chopra — and rightly so. But it's worth resisting the urge to simply list their achievements and move on, because the more interesting truth is what those achievements cost them, in an era when the word "professional" didn't remotely apply to a woman cricketer.

Shantha Rangaswamy captained the Indian team in that historic 1976 debut, taking guard as the first captain in the country's Test history at a time when women's cricket had precisely zero commercial value and roughly the same amount of institutional respect. Diana Edulji — a left-arm spinner whose numbers would embarrass plenty of contemporary bowlers — toured, trained, and represented her country for years in conditions that would be unthinkable for any cricketer, male or female, today: no sponsorship, patchy kit, minimal medical support, and tours that were often self-funded or funded on threadbare board budgets that had clearly been drawn up as an afterthought. These weren't women chasing fame or fortune, because there was almost none of either on offer. They played because they loved the game more than the game, at that point, deserved to be loved.

Anjum Chopra, who would go on to become one of the most recognizable faces of the sport in the 1990s and 2000s, effectively grew up inside this same austere ecosystem — one where a national call-up meant pride, certainly, but rarely any material change in your life. Mithali Raj, who debuted as a teenager in the late 1990s, spent the best part of two decades as the face of the sport, quietly compiling the kind of numbers — the most international runs by any woman in the game's history, at the time of her retirement — that should have made her a household name on the scale of any male cricketer, and yet spent large stretches of her career playing in front of sparse stands and even sparser headlines. Jhulan Goswami, meanwhile, was out on grounds in Chakdaha, West Bengal, dreaming of playing for India while balancing school and train journeys to Kolkata for coaching, before going on to become the leading wicket-taker in the history of women's ODI cricket — a genuine fast-bowling great who, for a large chunk of her career, trained and toured with barely a fraction of the recognition a moderately useful male domestic cricketer might expect.

None of these women had a WPL contract to look forward to. None of them had brand endorsements queued up. What they had was a stubborn, almost irrational belief that the sport was worth their best years regardless of what it gave back. That belief is the actual foundation stone of everything Indian cricket fans now get to enjoy — not a strategy document, not a five-year plan, just a chain of individually courageous decisions by women who kept showing up.

The stories nobody tells at dinner parties

If you ask a casual cricket fan to name a landmark moment in Indian women's cricket, you'll likely get one of two answers: the 2017 World Cup final loss to England at Lord's, or the 2025 World Cup win at home. Both are fair answers. But there is a whole substrate of smaller, stranger, more human stories sitting underneath the headline history that almost never get told, and they're arguably more revealing of what this sport actually took to build.

There's Mahendra Kumar Sharma himself, a man who, by most accounts, never sought credit for what he built and has largely gone unrecognized for pioneering the very structure that produced Diana Edulji, Shantha Rangaswamy, and everyone who followed. He isn't on any stamp. There's no stadium named after him. He is, at best, a footnote in most retellings of a sport he effectively invented in this country as an organized pursuit. thebetterindia

There's the fact that the WCAI received official government recognition only in 1978 — five full years after it had already registered itself, run multiple national tournaments, and joined the International Women's Cricket Council. The state took half a decade to catch up to what a handful of committed volunteers had already built. shethepeople

There's the deeply underappreciated 2005 story: India's first-ever World Cup final appearance, where they ran into an Australian juggernaut and lost by 98 runs. It's remembered, when it's remembered at all, as a defeat. What gets lost is that reaching that final at all — with a fraction of the board's attention, budget, or media appetite pointed their way — was itself a small miracle of talent surviving despite the system rather than because of it.

There's the 2017 final against England, which does get talked about, but usually just as "the one where they lost by nine runs." What deserves more airtime is what that near-miss actually did: it was arguably the single biggest catalyst for public and commercial interest in Indian women's cricket, a defeat so gripping and so widely watched that it did more for the sport's visibility than a decade of quiet Test-match grinding ever had. Sometimes the most transformative result in a sport's history is a loss.

And there's a story from 2022, easily lost in the ocean of India's cricketing content: at the Commonwealth Games, India reached the final and, in the semi-final against England, Sneh Rana defended fourteen off the last over, dismissing Katherine Brunt to seal victory by four runs and send India into their first-ever Commonwealth Games cricket final. It's a two-line entry in most record books. It deserves to be a chapter.

These aren't the stories that trend. They're the connective tissue.

The WPL: When money also respects the game

Every sport eventually needs an economic engine, and for a long time Indian women's cricket simply didn't have one. That changed, decisively, in February 2023, when the BCCI staged the inaugural Women's Premier League auction at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai. Of the 1,525 players who had registered for the auction, the list was pruned to 409, split between 246 Indians and 163 overseas players, competing for a maximum of 90 slots across five franchises. businesstoday

The numbers alone tell a story that would have been unimaginable to Diana Edulji's generation. The five franchise owners — among them Adani Sportsline, Reliance's Indiawin Sports, and the operators behind Royal Challengers Bangalore — collectively bid INR 4,669.99 crore for ownership rights, a figure BCCI secretary Jay Shah called proof that stakeholders "thoroughly believe in the concept." Smriti Mandhana became the first player ever auctioned in WPL history, sold to Royal Challengers Bangalore for INR 3.4 crore — a sum that, adjusted for what women cricketers had historically earned in this country, might as well have been a rounding error turned into a small fortune. bcci wisden

The real magic of the WPL, though, isn't the marquee prices. It's what happens two or three rungs below the marquee names — the domestic players from Baroda or Vidarbha or the Railways sides who spend a fortnight sharing a dressing room with Ellyse Perry or Alyssa Healy or Sophie Ecclestone and absorb, almost by osmosis, habits and standards that used to take a decade of international exposure to pick up. Uncapped young Indian cricketers who might otherwise have spent their entire careers in the relative obscurity of domestic cricket are now getting bid on, coached by World Cup winners, and given a stage in front of full stadiums and national broadcast audiences before they've even played for their country. That is the multiplier effect nobody quite predicted when the tournament was announced: the WPL isn't just paying stars, it's manufacturing the next generation faster and better than any academy could on its own.

The on-field payoff: No longer the plucky underdog

For decades, the honest, uncomfortable truth about Indian women's cricket was that it was talented but fragile — capable of a spectacular one-off performance, but rarely of sustained dominance against the game's genuine aristocracy: Australia, England, New Zealand, South Africa. That framing has quietly, decisively stopped being true.

In 2022, India won their first bilateral series on English soil in 23 years — a statement result that suggested the gap to the game's traditional powerhouse was closing. Three years later, in the summer of 2025, that gap looked to have closed further still. India won their first-ever T20I series against England, taking an unassailable 3-1 lead, with the series-clinching fourth match in Worcester built on India's spinners — Radha Yadav, Deepti Sharma, and newcomer Shree Charani — restricting England to a modest total that Shafali Verma and Smriti Mandhana chased down comfortably. India also won the accompanying ODI series 2-1, with Harmanpreet Kaur named player of the series. India women's national cricket team

Then came the World Cup, hosted on home soil, and it turned into the defining sporting story of the year. India reached the final for a third time, having previously fallen agonizingly short in both 2005 and 2017. The road there wasn't tidy — three successive defeats in the group phase had reopened every familiar doubt about India's ability to handle pressure on the biggest stage — but the semi-final against seven-time champions Australia produced arguably the signature statement of the entire tournament. Chasing 339, a genuinely enormous target, India got there — one of the highest successful run-chases in the history of Women's ODIs. Harmanpreet Kaur battled cramps to score a defiant 89, but the innings that will be replayed for years belonged to Jemimah Rodrigues — dropped from the side earlier in the tournament, recalled, and responding with an unbeaten 127 that has been called one of the greatest knocks in the competition's history. 

The final itself, against South Africa at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, was almost anticlimactic by comparison, in the way that a well-earned coronation often is. Shafali Verma — recalled to the squad only as injury cover — top-scored with a career-best 87 as India posted 298 for 7, then chipped in with the ball too, before Deepti Sharma sealed it with 5 for 39, taking the final wicket to confirm a 52-run win and India's maiden Women's World Cup title. Verma had been drafted into the squad barely a week earlier as cover for the injured Pratika Rawal, and walked away as player of the match in a World Cup final. Deepti Sharma finished the tournament as player of the tournament, having contributed 22 wickets and 215 runs across nine matches. Somewhere in South Africa's chase, Laura Wolvaardt made a genuinely magnificent century of her own — becoming the first captain ever to score a hundred in a Women's World Cup final — and still finished on the losing side, which tells you plenty about how far India had to climb, and how completely they'd climbed it. India Win ICC Women's World Cup 2025

It is worth stating plainly what that result means in the context of the SENA countries — South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia — that have historically formed cricket's power bloc, men's and women's game alike. India didn't sneak past a weakened Australian side or exploit a fluke pitch. They chased down 339 against the most decorated team in the format's history, in a knockout match, at a World Cup, and then beat South Africa in the final. That is not the profile of a plucky team that occasionally punches above its weight. That is the profile of a genuine top-two or top-three side in world cricket, and results across 2025 back that up rather than isolating it as a one-off.

The Pipeline: Why this isn't a peak but a base camp

The most reassuring part of India's current position isn't the senior team's results — it's what's coming up behind them. India's under-19 women's team has won back-to-back Under-19 World Cups, in 2023 and 2025, alongside an Under-19 Asia Cup title in 2024. That is not a fluke generation. That is a system now reliably manufacturing champions at the age-group level, which is precisely the leading indicator any serious cricketing nation should want. Wikipedia

Consider the names now filtering through: Shafali Verma, a genuine six-hitting phenomenon who was a teenage sensation before she was old enough to vote, walking into a World Cup final as injury cover and playing the innings of her career. Jemimah Rodrigues, dropped mid-tournament and returning to play one of the great World Cup knockout innings ever recorded. Richa Ghosh, a fearsome hitter behind the stumps still barely into her twenties. Deepti Sharma, an all-rounder whose value to the side — bat, ball, and clearly, temperament — is now arguably comparable to any all-rounder in the men's game. Pratika Rawal, described by multiple observers as one of the breakout stars of the World Cup before injury intervened. Shreyanka Patil, Titas Sadhu, Kranti Goud — names that would have meant nothing outside hardcore domestic-cricket circles five years ago, now genuine international performers with WPL contracts and national caps to their name.

The infrastructure behind them has changed just as sharply as the visibility. The WPL means domestic-level Indian cricketers are now training and competing alongside the very best in the world every year, not once every few years on a rare overseas tour. Central contracts and improved match fees mean fewer players have to choose between cricket and a stable career — the same dilemma that quietly ended so many promising careers in the Rangaswamy and Edulji era. State associations have visibly increased investment in girls' age-group cricket, partly because the WPL auction has turned unearthed domestic talent into a genuinely marketable commodity, which is its own quietly brilliant incentive structure: scouting is no longer charity, it's good business.

None of this guarantees perpetual dominance — sport doesn't work that way, and Australia in particular remain a fearsomely deep, ruthlessly professional outfit that won't simply hand over their supremacy. But the honest assessment, based on what's visible right now — a World Cup title, back-to-back age-group world titles, a thriving domestic league, a deepening pool of genuine match-winners, and results against every SENA nation in the last two years — is that India isn't at a peak. It's closer to base camp for what could be a genuinely extended period near the summit of the women's game.

A closing word — Including one for those in suits (for a change)

It would be easy to end this piece purely on the players, and they deserve every word of praise that's been written here and plenty more. But there's a group that rarely gets acknowledged warmly in Indian cricket writing, and this feels like the rare, fair occasion to do it: the administrators.

Indian cricket administration has, over the decades, earned no shortage of its criticism — for opacity, for politics, for priorities that too often seemed to favor spectacle over substance. But on women's cricket specifically, something has genuinely gone right in the last several years. The decision to launch the WPL with serious financial backing rather than a token, underfunded gesture; the willingness to give the team consistent central contracts and match fees closer to parity with the men's setup; the choice to host and heavily promote the 2025 World Cup on home soil rather than treat it as a scheduling obligation — these were real decisions, made by real people in real boardrooms, and they mattered. It is entirely possible to hold administrators accountable for their many historical failures while still crediting them for getting this particular, important thing largely right. Credit, in this case, is due — and it's rare enough that it's worth actually saying.

From a rickshaw and a microphone in 1973, to two hundred curious spectators in Lucknow, to Diana Edulji touring on threadbare budgets, to Mithali Raj quietly amassing a mountain of runs in front of empty stands, to Jhulan Goswami redefining what fast bowling could look like in the women's game, to a nine-run heartbreak at Lord's that somehow did more good than a dozen quiet wins — every part of that chain led here: to a home World Cup, a stadium full of thirty thousand people, and an Indian team that beat Australia and South Africa in the space of a week to become, undeniably, world champions.

The trophy is real. But it isn't really the point. The point is that Indian women's cricket no longer needs anyone's permission to be taken seriously — not from a skeptical relative, not from an underfunded board, not from the game's old aristocracy. It has simply, patiently, brilliantly earned its seat at the top table, and on current evidence, it isn't planning on giving it up anytime soon. 

After all, Mhaari chhoriyan chhoron se kam hain key?!

Jai Ho!

Sachin vs Virat: The "GOAT" Debate

In the last few days, a cricket argument that most Indian fans thought had been settled in their hearts, if not on paper, was reopened by one of the most respected voices in the modern game. AB de Villiers, a man who shared a dressing room with Virat Kohli at Royal Challengers Bengaluru for over a decade and who built his own reputation as one of the finest batters of his generation, said on his YouTube channel that Kohli had taken Indian batting overseas to "a level even Sachin Tendulkar had not reached." His reasoning was specific: Tendulkar was the first subcontinental batter to prove that Indian players could succeed on bouncy, seaming pitches outside Asia, but Kohli, in de Villiers' eyes, pushed that standard further and raised the bar for everyone who came after.

The comments landed exactly as you'd expect a match dropped in a room full of dry leaves to land. Former India pacer Dodda Ganesh fired back within hours, sarcastically telling de Villiers to "pass on the weed," a blunt dismissal of the claim. Fans picked sides across social media. Statisticians pulled up spreadsheets. And the oldest fault line in Indian cricket fandom — Sachin or Virat — cracked open again, right as India was busy handing Sri Lanka a 165-run hiding in the first Test at Galle.

Here is the thing about that fault line: it has always run deeper than "who scored more" or "who averaged higher in this particular sub-category of conditions." It is a debate about what greatness actually means in a team sport where one man's runs are only ever half the story. And when you look at the whole story — not just Kohli's overseas average, not just Tendulkar's overseas average, but the era each man batted in, the bowling attacks they faced, the burden they carried, and the shadow each man's career cast over the game that came after — the conclusion is not close. Sachin Tendulkar remains, and will likely remain for a very long time, the greatest cricketer India has ever produced. Virat Kohli is a magnificent, era-defining batter and the rightful heir to a piece of Tendulkar's throne. But heir is not the same as equal, and equal is not the same as superior.

Let's build the case properly, because this argument deserves more than nostalgia and more than a highlight reel.

Start With the Only Person Whose Opinion Should End the Debate: Virat Kohli Himself

Before we get anywhere near statistics, there's a simple truth that a lot of people conveniently skip past when they want to crown Kohli as the greater of the two: Virat Kohli has spent his entire adult life calling Sachin Tendulkar his idol.

This isn't a one-off quote dug up for convenience. It is a running thread through Kohli's career. He has spoken, repeatedly and emotionally, about watching Tendulkar bat as a child in Delhi and deciding then and there what he wanted his life to look like. He dedicated India's 2011 World Cup win to Tendulkar, famously saying the team carried him on their shoulders because Tendulkar had carried Indian cricket on his for twenty-one years. When Kohli surpassed Tendulkar's ODI century tally in 2023, reaching his fiftieth hundred in a World Cup semi-final at the Wankhede — the same ground, fittingly, where Tendulkar lifted the World Cup in 2011 — Kohli's reaction wasn't triumph. It was reverence. He pointed to the sky, he looked toward the stands, and he made sure the moment was framed as a tribute rather than a coronation.

There is something worth sitting with here. Kohli is not a falsely modest man. He is competitive to the point of ferocity, unapologetic about his ambition, and has never pretended to be anything other than a player who wants to be the best in the world. This is a man who talks trash on the field, who has had documented rivalries with opposition players, who built his entire captaincy identity around aggression and self-belief. And yet, when the conversation turns to Tendulkar, all of that competitive instinct softens into something closer to devotion. That is not a coincidence, and it is not humility theater. It is Kohli, more clear-eyed about the history of the game than most pundits arguing on his behalf, acknowledging what he saw with his own eyes growing up and what he has come to understand even more since retiring from Test cricket: that Tendulkar operated in a context that no batter since has had to fully replicate.

If the man himself, the one supposedly being crowned above his idol by outside observers, refuses to accept that framing, shouldn't that tell us something? De Villiers is entitled to his opinion, and it's an informed one from a great player. But Kohli's own voice on this subject carries more weight than anyone else's, and Kohli has never once suggested he sees himself as bigger than Sachin Tendulkar.

The Numbers, Properly Read

Let's deal with the stats, because they matter, even if they are not the whole argument.

Sachin Tendulkar retired with 15,921 Test runs from 200 matches at an average of 53.78, with 51 centuries — both figures that stood, at the time of his retirement, as the outright records in the format. He also holds the record for the most ODI runs ever scored, over 18,000 of them, and was for years the record-holder for most ODI centuries too, with 49, before Kohli eventually surpassed it. Across all international cricket, Tendulkar reached 100 centuries, a mark so far ahead of anyone else in the sport's history that when people talk about it, they usually just call it "the hundred hundreds," as if no further explanation is needed. It isn't.

Kohli, for his part, retired from Test cricket in 2025 with 9,230 runs from 123 matches at an average of 46.85 and 30 centuries, including seven double-hundreds — the most by any Indian batter in the format. In ODIs, he has gone past 14,800 runs and, as of early 2026, holds the record for the most centuries in the format at 54, having overtaken Tendulkar's mark back in 2023. Across formats, Kohli's international century count sits at 85, which puts him second only to Tendulkar on the all-time list — fifteen centuries behind, with only the ODI column still open to him since his Test and T20I tallies are now final.

Read quickly, that comparison might look competitive. Read carefully, it tells a different story, and the difference lies in three things: longevity, workload, and what each man's runs actually meant to his team's chances of winning.

Tendulkar played 200 Test matches. Kohli played 123. Tendulkar's international career spanned twenty-four years, debuting as a sixteen-year-old in 1989 and playing his final Test in 2013. Across that span, the sport itself changed shape multiple times over — helmets became mandatory rather than occasional, pitches were prepared differently across different decades, bowling attacks evolved from the express pace of the late eighties to the reverse-swing era to the two-new-ball ODI rules that flattened out swing bowling in the 2010s. Tendulkar didn't just survive one era of bowling. He survived four or five overlapping ones, adjusting his technique as his body aged, as his eyesight and reflexes inevitably slowed, and as opposition teams built entire bowling plans around dismissing him specifically, year after year, for over two decades.

Kohli's career, remarkable as it is, unfolded over a much shorter window and under substantially different conditions — better bats, shorter boundaries in white-ball cricket, fielding restrictions that favored batters, flatter pitches prepared by broadcasters who wanted more boundaries, and a support cast around him that, as we'll get to, was frequently strong enough to share the burden Tendulkar so often had to carry alone.

None of this is said to diminish what Kohli achieved. It is said to point out that "more centuries in a shorter career, in a batting-friendlier era, with more support" and "fewer centuries in a longer career, in a bowling-friendlier era, with far less support" are not directly comparable using century counts alone. You have to ask what each hundred actually cost the man who scored it, and what it meant for the team that received it.

The Bowlers They Actually Faced

This is where the AB de Villiers argument, and frankly most modern arguments in Kohli's favor, tend to fall apart the moment you look closely.

Sachin Tendulkar's twenty-four-year career put him directly in the crosshairs of what is, by any honest reckoning, one of the greatest concentrations of fast-bowling and spin talent the sport has ever assembled in a single era. Consider who he had to face, not once or twice, but across entire series, entire tours, entire decades:

Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, two of the greatest exponents of reverse swing the game has ever produced, operating at the peak of their powers throughout the 1990s specifically against India, with Pakistan-India tensions adding an extra psychological weight to every ball. Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, arguably the finest fast bowler and finest leg-spinner in the history of the sport, both peaking in the same Australian sides that toured India and hosted India across the late nineties and 2000s. Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, the last great pairing of the West Indies pace factory, still terrifying batters well into the 1990s. Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, and later Dale Steyn and Makhaya Ntini from South Africa. Muttiah Muralitharan, the greatest wicket-taker in Test history, operating for two full decades as a nightmare for every batting lineup in world cricket, India's included. Courtney rounding out with Brett Lee and later a fully-formed Steyn-Morkel South African pace attack in the 2000s.

That is not a list of good bowlers. That is a list that includes, by nearly every credible ranking exercise ever conducted by cricket historians, the actual GOAT of fast bowling (McGrath or Akram, depending on who you ask), the actual GOAT of leg-spin (Warne, unchallenged), and the actual GOAT of off-spin and of wicket-taking outright (Muralitharan, by a distance in the record books). Tendulkar didn't face one all-time great bowling attack. He faced, across the arc of his career, the peak version of nearly every all-time great bowling attack fielded by every major Test nation, because his career was simply long enough to overlap with all of them.

Now look at Kohli's era. He is a phenomenal player of fast bowling and built a genuinely excellent Test record against most attacks he faced. But be honest about who those attacks were built around: Dale Steyn in the back half of his career and Kagiso Rabada from South Africa, James Anderson and Stuart Broad from England — both excellent, workmanlike, but not spoken of in the same breath as an Akram or a McGrath by most historians — Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, and Mitchell Starc from Australia, a very good trio without a single bowler most panels would rank inside the all-time top five at their own discipline, and Trent Boult and Tim Southee from New Zealand. Good bowlers. Very good, in some cases genuinely great, bowlers. But nowhere in that list is there a consensus GOAT of pace bowling, a consensus GOAT of spin, and a consensus GOAT of wicket-taking overall, all operating in their pomp during the years Kohli was scoring his runs.

This is the part of the debate that gets flattened whenever people just compare batting averages side by side. An average doesn't know who was bowling. Fifty-three point seven eight against Akram, Warne, McGrath, and Muralitharan across two decades is not the same achievement, in terms of what it tells you about a batter's class, as a very good average against a collection of very good but not legendary attacks. Tendulkar didn't just play in a golden era of batting. He played through what is inarguably the single greatest concentration of bowling talent world cricket has produced in the sport's history, across pace and spin combined, and he still came out the leading run-scorer the format has ever seen.

Carrying a Team Alone vs. Batting in a Fab Four

There's a phrase that gets used a lot in this debate, and it's worth unpacking properly rather than throwing around as a slogan: "Sachin carried India alone."

For long stretches of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, that wasn't hyperbole, it was the literal batting lineup on the scorecard. India's top order for years rested overwhelmingly on Tendulkar's shoulders, with the rest of the batting frequently inconsistent, inexperienced, or simply not built to win matches on its own against elite attacks. There's a well-worn cricket saying from that era — "if Sachin gets out, India loses" — that existed because it was statistically, verifiably true across an enormous number of matches. Opposition captains built entire bowling and field-setting strategies specifically to dismiss one man, because they knew that removing Tendulkar early was often functionally equivalent to winning the match. That is an extraordinary, singular kind of pressure. It means every innings he walked out to bat, he wasn't just batting for his average. He was batting as the difference between his team having a chance and his team having none.

Kohli, by contrast, built the bulk of his career's white-ball legacy inside what the cricket world affectionately nicknamed the "Fab Four" era — himself alongside Steve Smith, Joe Root, and Kane Williamson, four batters from four different nations dominating world cricket at largely the same time, each pushing the others. That's a wonderful thing for the sport, and it speaks to the strength of competition Kohli faced from his peers. But within his own dressing room specifically, Kohli also had the benefit of batting alongside Rohit Sharma, one of the greatest ODI and T20 openers the format has produced, alongside a genuinely deep and skilled Indian middle and lower order across most of his prime years, and later alongside players like Shubman Gill and Shreyas Iyer who could shoulder scoring responsibility when Kohli himself had an off day. When Kohli failed, India frequently still had multiple other routes to victory. When Tendulkar failed for much of his prime, India often simply didn't have one.

This is precisely the distinction that gets lost when people wave stat sheets at each other and never ask what the runs were actually doing for the team around them. Kohli has, rightly, been immense in run chases — his fourth-innings and chasing numbers in ODIs are legitimately some of the best any batter has ever produced, and there is no attempt here to take that away from him. He has won India matches from impossible positions, has shown ice-cold composure under the weight of expectation in World Cups and ICC finals, and has been, by any measure, a phenomenal big-match player. But he has almost always done it as the best of several very good options, not as the only option standing between his team and defeat. Tendulkar spent the better part of two decades as exactly that: the only option, night after night, series after series, without the depth of support that Kohli enjoyed for most of his career.

What It Took an Entire Generation of GOATs to Even Approach

Here is, perhaps, the single most underrated argument in Tendulkar's favor, and it's one that doesn't get made nearly often enough: look at who it has taken to even get close to his records, and how many of them it has taken.

Tendulkar retired as the all-time leading run-scorer in Test cricket. The man currently chasing that record down is Joe Root, an England captain and, by any measure, one of the finest batters of his own generation — a genuine great of the modern game, closing in on both the most Test runs and the most Test matches played. It is entirely possible Root gets there. But note what that means: it has taken one of the very best batters of an entirely different generation, from an entirely different cricketing culture, playing an entirely different number of matches under different conditions, working across the majority of his own career just to have a realistic shot at a record Tendulkar set essentially by himself, in his own era, largely without a rival threatening to catch him at the time.

Tendulkar also held the record for most ODI centuries for years. It took Virat Kohli — a genuine, all-time great in his own right, one of the best white-ball batters the sport has ever produced — an entire career of sustained excellence, in a batting-friendlier era, with better bats and shorter boundaries and flatter white-ball pitches, to finally push past that mark.

Stop and actually sit with that for a second. It has not taken one great player to challenge Tendulkar's standing in the record books. It has taken multiple, separate, era-defining greats — Root chasing one record, Kohli chasing another, each of them among the two or three best batters of their own respective generations — each working an entire career just to get within range of, or eventually surpass, individual pieces of what Tendulkar built. That is not a coincidence, and it is not just a function of him having played a long time. Plenty of players have played long careers without leaving marks this durable. It's a testimony to the sheer scale, consistency, and quality of what Tendulkar produced, sustained without serious interruption across more than two decades, that the sport has needed several of its most gifted modern successors, operating independently across different formats and different eras, just to individually approach different fragments of his overall body of work. No single successor has matched the whole picture. It has taken the sport's best collectively chasing pieces of it.

That is what real, generational, structurally unmatched greatness looks like. It isn't that no one has ever come close in any one category — it's that coming close in any single category has required the best that an entirely new generation of the sport had to offer.

Kohli's Own Greatness Deserves to Be Stated Plainly

None of this should be read as diminishing Kohli, because that isn't the intent, and it wouldn't be honest either. Virat Kohli is, by any reasonable measure, one of the five or six greatest batters India has ever produced, and arguably the finest chaser of totals white-ball cricket has ever seen. His fitness standards changed the culture of the Indian dressing room permanently, dragging a generation of cricketers toward professionalism in a way that outlasted his own playing career. His captaincy turned India into a fast-bowling nation with genuine overseas Test ambitions, something that simply hadn't existed at that level before him. His conduct under pressure in ICC knockout games, his hundred-plus centuries across formats, his seven Test double-centuries, his all-time record for ODI hundreds — these are not small things, and nobody serious about the sport pretends otherwise.

He has been the standard-bearer for a full decade and a half of Indian cricket, carrying the emotional weight of an entire nation's cricketing expectations through a social media era that Tendulkar never had to navigate, where every single innings is dissected, memed, and criticized in real time by millions of people within minutes. That is its own unique pressure, and Kohli has largely handled it with remarkable resilience.

But being a worthy successor to a throne is not the same as being greater than the man who built it. Kohli inherited a game, a fanbase, and a set of expectations that Tendulkar's career had already shaped and elevated to unprecedented heights. He took that inheritance and did something genuinely special with it. That is admirable. It is not, however, evidence that he surpassed the man whose legacy he was inheriting — and, again, it is worth returning to the fact that Kohli himself has never claimed otherwise.

Beyond the Numbers: Conduct, Class, and What Neither Stat Sheet Can Capture

There's one more dimension to this that rarely gets its due weight in these debates, because it can't be reduced to a spreadsheet, and that's conduct — both on the field and off it.

Tendulkar played for twenty-four years under an intensity of public scrutiny that is difficult to overstate, carrying not just batting responsibility but something closer to a national emotional burden, and in all that time built a reputation for dignity that remains, to this day, essentially uncontested. There is no notable controversy attached to his name across more than two decades in the public eye — not with umpires, not with opponents, not with teammates, not off the field. He handled genuine adulation bordering on deification with a level of humility that friends, rivals, and journalists across every cricketing nation have independently and consistently described the same way. When he retired in 2013, the tributes came not just from India but from every corner of the cricketing world, including from bowlers who had spent entire careers trying and failing to dismiss him, because the respect he commanded was earned as much through how he carried himself as through what he scored.

Kohli, to his credit, has grown remarkably in this regard over the course of his career too, mellowing from a fierier, occasionally combative young cricketer into a senior statesman of the game who is now widely respected across cricketing nations. That evolution is genuinely admirable and worth acknowledging. But it is an evolution — a journey from a more turbulent starting point toward the kind of consistent, unwavering conduct that Tendulkar simply exhibited from the very beginning of his career to its very end, without the same visible arc of change required to get there.

This isn't a small, sentimental footnote to bolt onto the end of a stats argument. Greatness in cricket, particularly in a country where cricketers occupy something closer to religious significance than sporting celebrity, has always been judged by more than numbers. It's judged by what a player represents, how they carry the weight of a billion people's expectations without letting it curdle into arrogance or controversy, and how they leave the game relative to how they found it. By that measure too, Tendulkar's record is essentially spotless across an almost impossibly long career, and that consistency of character across such a demanding, unrelenting spotlight is its own form of greatness.

So, Who Wins the Debate?

AB de Villiers is a legend of the game, and he's entitled to look at overseas Test conditions specifically and conclude that Kohli's average in that narrow slice of the format edges Tendulkar's. That's a defensible, specific, narrow claim, and reasonable people can debate the exact numbers behind it.

But that narrow claim is not the same as the sweeping one that gets attached to it in the retelling — that Kohli is simply the better cricketer, full stop. That claim doesn't survive contact with the whole picture. It doesn't survive the length and difficulty of the era Tendulkar batted through. It doesn't survive the sheer concentration of all-time great bowlers — the actual GOATs of pace and spin — that Tendulkar had to face, tour after tour, for twenty-four years, compared to the very good but rarely legendary attacks Kohli built his numbers against. It doesn't survive the difference between being the one man an entire batting lineup depended on and being the best of several very good options in a talented dressing room. It doesn't survive the fact that it has taken not one but multiple all-time greats of an entirely new generation — Root chasing his Test aggregate, Kohli chasing his ODI century count — each spending an entire career just to individually approach different fragments of what Tendulkar built alone. And it doesn't survive Kohli's own, repeated, unforced testimony about who he considers the standard he has always been chasing.

Virat Kohli is a phenomenal cricketer, one of the best India has ever seen, and a completely worthy heir to the ODI throne Tendulkar once occupied. He deserves every ounce of the praise and admiration he receives, and this debate losing him the title of "greatest" takes nothing away from what he's built.

But heir is the correct word. Not equal. Not successor-who-surpassed. Heir.

Sachin Tendulkar remains the standard the entire sport, across generations, is still measuring itself against. No one trumps him. Not yet, and — based on what it has taken the game's best modern talents just to chase pieces of his legacy — perhaps not for a very long time to come.

As they say, Virat and all are fine but Sachin is Sachin yaar!

Jai Ho!

My squad for World Cup 2027

Let's address the elephant in the stadium: the 2027 World Cup is still comfortably over a year away, which in cricket-selection terms is roughly the distance between "reasonable planning" and "certified lunatic with a spreadsheet." And yet, here we are. Because that's the thing about being a fan with a plan — you don't wait for the selectors to do their job. You beat them to it, sharpen your pencil, and build the squad you'd pick if BCCI accidentally left the group chat open and handed you the keys.

So here's the pool: 25 players, filtered down from a nation with more batting depth than sense of restraint.

Eleven of them (in green) form the First XI. Four more players (in yellow) complete a travelling squad of fifteen. Eleven others make up a Second Choice XI — not "reserves who carry the drinks," but a legitimate mirror-image team built to replicate the First XI's exact skill profile, position for position. And three final names sit in the wings as pure insurance policies — one batting cover, one pace cover, one spin cover — for the day the universe decides your top two choices in a role are both simultaneously unavailable.

Twenty-five names. Every one of them earning their place for a reason. Let's walk through it.

The First XI: Your Green-Lit Starting Eleven

This is the team that walks out on opening day, assuming health, form, and the cricketing gods all cooperate — a big "assuming," but that's what depth is insurance against.

The Top Order: Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill (captain) open, because if it isn't broken, don't just avoid fixing it — actively worship it. Virat Kohli follows at three, still doing what Virat Kohli does, which is turning "chasing 280" into a personal art installation. Shreyas Iyer, as vice-captain, anchors the middle order — a role he's made his own with the calm of a man who has decided panic is for other people.

Behind the Stumps: Ishan Kishan gets the gloves. The rationale isn't just the keeping — it's the left-hand variety he injects into a middle order that could otherwise get monotonously right-handed, plus the strike-rate he brings when the innings needs someone to stop being polite about the bowling.

The All-Round Engine Room: Axar Patel and Hardik Pandya occupy the "Complete AR" slots — players who can win you a match with bat or ball, not just contribute respectably with both. Ravindra Jadeja slots in as the Bowling AR: a spinner first, sure, but one whose batting has bailed India out of enough corners that "just a bowler" stopped being an accurate description years ago. Between these three, India covers its all-round spin department entirely through multi-skilled players rather than a specialist tweaker — which is also why you won't find a pure spinner in this XI. When Axar and Jadeja are both bowling their overs and contributing runs, you don't need a third spin option cluttering the XI.

The Pace Battery: Bhuvaneshwar Kumar, Jasprit Bumrah, and Mohammed Siraj make up the seam attack — Bhuvi's control and seam movement up front, Bumrah doing whatever it is Bumrah does that defies conventional biomechanics, and Siraj as the relentless, high-energy third seamer who never lets an over feel like a breather for the batter.

That's your eleven: four specialist batters, one keeper-batter, three all-rounders covering both bat and spin duties, and three pacers. A balanced, battle-tested unit.

The Final Four: Completing the 15

A World Cup squad isn't just an XI — it's an XI plus the four names who turn a starting team into a travelling insurance policy. These aren't afterthoughts; each one is the direct, ready-made replacement for a specific First XI player.

• KL Rahul (captain, backup keeper) — the deputy gloveman, and importantly, a middle-order option in his own right if Ishan Kishan has an off tournament or an off ankle.
• Mohammed Shami — the fourth seamer, a proven big-tournament performer who can walk into any of the three pace slots without the attack skipping a beat.
• Kuldeep Yadav — and here's the interesting one. The First XI carries zero specialist spinners, relying entirely on Axar and Jadeja for tweaked overs. Kuldeep is the squad's insurance against a wicket that suddenly demands genuine mystery spin, or a tournament stretch where the ball just isn't turning enough for all-rounders alone.
• Shivam Dube — the power-hitting Batting AR, there to inject some left-handed muscle into the middle overs and give the think-tank a finishing option that doesn't rely purely on the top four getting it right.

Fifteen names. A squad that's balanced on paper and, more importantly, balanced in personality — swagger up top, control in the middle, chaos (the good kind) at the death.

The Second Choice XI: A Carbon Copy, Not a Consolation Prize

Here's where the planning gets genuinely clever. Rather than assembling "the next 11 best players" as a random grab-bag, this is a Second XI built to replicate the exact same skill architecture as the first — a shadow team that could theoretically take the field tomorrow and not look like a downgrade in balance, even if it's a downgrade in reputation (for now).

• Yashasvi Jaiswal & Vaibhav Sooryavanshi open — the swashbuckling twenty-something answer to Rohit and Gill, all raw intent and minimal fear.
• Sanju Samson (vice-captain, keeper option) bats at three, doubling as a keeping alternative in this XI's own right.
• Tilak Varma holds the middle order together — composed beyond his years, in the Shreyas Iyer mould.
• KL Rahul (captain) — yes, he appears here too, because a genuine like-for-like backup for a specialist keeper-batter is rare enough that the same man plausibly leads both squads' depth chart.
• Shivam Dube and Washington Sundar cover the all-round bases, Harshit Rana provides the Bowling AR spark in Pandya/Jadeja's mould.
• Kuldeep Yadav again does spin-cover duty, while Mohammed Shami and Prince Yadav round out an entirely credible pace attack.

Notice something: Rahul, Dube, Shami, and Kuldeep aren't just Second XI members — they're the very four who complete the 15-man squad. Which makes sense once you think about it: the closest replacement for a First XI player, by definition, is often good enough to travel with the senior squad rather than sit at home waiting for a phone call.

The Reserve Trio: Break Glass in Case of Emergency

Beyond the 22 players spread across both XIs sit three specialists — not part of either playing eleven, but insurance for a very specific kind of crisis:

• Rajat Patidar — the batting reserve, ready to step in if the middle order needs a fresh face with red-hot domestic form.
• Arshdeep Singh — the pace reserve, left-arm variety in the pocket if conditions or workload demand a fourth seam option beyond Shami.
• Varun Chakravarthy — the spin reserve, mystery variations held in cold storage for a pitch that turns square and a moment that needs something the primary spin-bowling all-rounders can't quite conjure.

This is the "25" complete: 11 + 11 + 3.

The Skillset Ledger

Slice the 25 by role instead of by team, and the balance becomes even clearer:

Wicketkeepers: 3 - Ishan Kishan, KL Rahul, Sanju Samson

Specialist Batters: 8 - Gill, Rohit, Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Jaiswal, Vaibhav, Tilak Varma,   Patidar

Pacers: 6 - Bumrah, Siraj, Bhuvi, Shami, Arshdeep, Prince Yadav

Spinners: 2 - Kuldeep Yadav, Varun Chakravarthy

Complete All-Rounders: 2 - Hardik Pandya, Axar Patel

Batting All-Rounders: 2 - Shivam Dube, Washington Sundar

Bowling All-Rounders: 2 - Ravindra Jadeja, Harshit Rana

Add it up and you get 25 — a squad that's batting-heavy by design (eight specialist batters is no accident, given how many ODI run-chases turn into nerve-shredders), pace-rich (six seamers reflects modern ODI cricket's obsession with variety and reverse swing), and deliberately thin on specialist spin, because when your all-rounders can turn the ball themselves, you don't need to carry passengers.

The "Replacement for the Replacement" List

Even the best-laid squads need a Plan C, because injuries in cricket have the comedic timing of a poorly-written sitcom — they always strike the week before the big event. So, four names sit just outside the 25, ready to be summoned if the injury list gets genuinely alarming:

• Mayank Yadav — for when the pace reserves need a reserve, and raw, borderline-unfair speed is the requirement.
• Sai Sudharsan — left-handed batting cover, for balance in the middle order if the lefties above him are unavailable.
• Ruturaj Gaikwad — the elegant right-handed batting option, classical technique as a fallback for the top or middle order.
• Nitish Reddy — batting all-rounder depth, for when even the all-rounder cupboard looks bare.

None of these four are in the 25 — think of them as names pencilled into the margins, visible only if you squint at the depth chart hard enough. But that's the whole point of planning this early: by the time 2027 actually arrives, half these calls will look prophetic, and the other half will be cheerfully, spectacularly wrong. Either way, it's more fun than waiting for the selectors to catch up.

Hopefully, by the time the action begins in South Africa, we will get to see most (if not all) of them in action. And most importantly, in getting the Cup home.
Jai Ho!