She shattered a number of batting information and impressed many to select up a cricket bat
She shattered a number of batting information and impressed many to select up a cricket bat
For an extended, very long time, there was just one poster lady for Indian girls’s cricket. She answered to the title Mithali Raj.
For greater than twenty years, she carried the bat for the Women in Blue — and on the uncommon events once they wore whites — in admirable style.
She introduced her retirement from worldwide cricket, on the age of 39, on Wednesday. India’s match in opposition to South Africa within the Women’s World Cup at Christchurch on March 27 has turned out to be her final.
It had all begun when her father took her to her brother’s cricket coaching classes at Secunderabad the place the coach first noticed her potential.
The recreation will miss her assured presence on the wicket, and people beauteous cowl drives. Her pleasant smile — even on the finish of a demanding and even disappointing day — will even be missed. She has been a wonderful ambassador for girls’s cricket.
An inspiration
Mithali shattered a number of batting information. She impressed many women to select up a cricket bat when it wasn’t essentially the most glamorous factor to do.
From her bat have flown 7,805 runs in 232 ODIs and a couple of,364 in 89 T20Is. If she performed solely in 12 Tests, that’s as a result of girls get to play just a few of them. She scored 699 runs in these Tests; her 214, which she made at Taunton in opposition to England in 2002, stays the second highest particular person rating in Women’s Tests.
With 10,868 runs, she is the main scorer in worldwide girls’s cricket.
She can be the best run-getter in WODIs, during which she made a shocking debut aged 16 in 1999, with an unbeaten 114 in opposition to Ireland at Milton Keynes. She led India in two World Cup finals.
Bright stars
By the time Mithali reached the night of her profession, Indian girls’s cricket was not nearly her, or the champion bowler and her modern, Jhulan Goswami. If the sport has a number of brilliant stars now in Smriti Mandhana, Harmanpreet Kaur and Shafali Verma, she is among the greatest causes for that.
She was the Sunil Gavaskar of ladies’s cricket the Sachin Tendulkars and Rahul Dravids wished to emulate.
Source: www.thehindu.com
