The Indian women’s cricket returned to sensational touch as they went onto drub the Australian women in the T20I series opener convincingly in Navi Mumbai. Smriti Mandhana played a gem of a knock again, pairing perfectly alongside Shafali Verma who was electric in her approach as chasing 142, the hosts won the game with 14 balls and nine wickets to spare.

Mandhana anchored the innings with 54-run knock while Verma battered an unbeaten 64 from just 44 balls, whacking six fours and three sixes. Talking after the match, Mandhana highlighted the turnaround of events and her elation at the team’s commitment during the match.

Smriti said, “The way the ODI series went, we were all very disappointed. We worked on ourselves in the 2 days we had. Really pleased with ourselves, especially after that last game. We analyzed a lot about what went wrong in the last couple of days.”

She further added, “We had a good long meeting with all of us. The seamers bowled really well today, Titas was brilliant. She comes from Bengal and Bengal has already given us a legendary cricketer (Jhulan Goswami), don’t want to draw comparisons but she has a lot of clarity, especially for her age.”