The year 2023 so far has majorly been about cricket. The Under-19 women’s team winning a world cup, the long-awaited Women’s Premier League (WPL) coming into action, new exciting talents getting recognized and further getting a chance to represent the country in the ongoing Emerging Women’s Asia Cup in Hong Kong. This turn of events has certainly taken the Indian women’s cricket and its representatives a notch higher.
On the other hand, men’s cricket was no lesser exciting but has been heart-breaking too. It took two years of hard work, at home and away, for the senior men’s team to seal a spot in the World Test Championship (WTC) Final. The qualification gave the fans hope that Team India would finally end the decade-long drought for an ICC title. But unfortunately, the wait continues as Rohit Sharma & Co lost the big final to Australia in London.
News18 CricketNext recently caught up with former India women’s team captain Anjum Chopra to discuss all the cricketing activities India have been involved in. As a former India cricketer and a successful broadcaster, Anjum spoke about the emergence of WPL, the men’s team faltering at the WTC Final and a lot more.
Here are the excerpts:
Let’s start the conversation with the inaugural edition of the Women’s Emerging Asia Cup. How big is this initiative in women’s cricket?
It’s nice with more teams participating and especially for the younger lot as they get to play international cricket. It’s always encouraging with more matches being played and the way this tournament happening over the past few years. So, yeah! It’s a very different feeling to wear the Indian jersey.
Talking about young girls coming to the fore, the inaugural edition of the WPL was certainly a benchmark in India’s women’s cricket. You closely observed the entire season, what was the biggest takeaway for you?
The fact that the tournament got started finally, was the biggest takeaway. We got to see competitive matches, good cricket and also, the Indian cricket team doing well. So, in totality, if you look at the entire set-up everything was a positive. The way it was conducted in a very short period, it was very good. So, there are more positive and good things that are there for the WPL when I look back.
People turned up in large numbers for WPL games and the stadiums were mostly full house. Did you expect that kind of response from them?
To be fair, I didn’t even go that far to think that we’ll have a full house. It was nice to see full houses. The very fact that it was decided that the tournament will be conducted in Mumbai, and these two venues is probably one of the facts that the India vs Australia match also had a good turnout. So, for us as broadcasters, that thought didn’t even come that what sort of capacity of the crowd we’ll get to see at the stadium. But there was a lot of support.
DC and MI were the two stand-out teams of the season but Mumbai Indians seemed to be covering all the bases. Superb captaincy from Harman, overseas and uncapped players putting up their best effort. Do you think they have set a benchmark, even for the men in IPL, when it comes to constituting a team in franchise cricket?
See, I don’t compare men’s and women’s teams, be it in franchise cricket or the international circuit. If MI have won that doesn’t mean we probably start looking out at all the negative or not-so-happening things in the men’s team. It’s absolutely unfair, there’s absolutely no base to compare. MI won, very good. They ticked all the boxes, very good. The captain led the way, Natalie Sciever was their top performer and there were other players too who kept contributing. I won’t see it as a comparison. It’s the same franchise, the same owners, the same team. So, that doesn’t mean the men’s team hasn’t done well.
Moving on to men’s cricket, let’s discuss a bit about the heartbreak we had a couple of days back. Back-to-back losses in WTC Finals. In your opinion, what went wrong for Rohit & his boys at The Oval?
I’ll say the batting didn’t go right. I won’t say what went wrong. The idea is to look at how things could have been better. I always felt that the contest will be between the two batting sides, not anything more or less. Australia, obviously batted a lot better. In those conditions, if India had batted, we don’t know what would’ve been the score the way the Australians batted. Looking back, we probably couldn’t manage those many runs and batted for nearly two days. So, that was one of the areas where we fell short, despite having a tall-batting order.
This Indian top-order has some of the greatest modern-era batters. But on a big occasion, they misfired again. I want to ask why it is happening so often in the past 5-6 years.
I would like to see everything in isolation and not club it in. We are talking about the ICC tournaments and won’t include everything and understand how and when we falter. At the end of the day, it’s all about scoring runs and taking wickets. Whoever does it better, ends up winning. It doesn’t really matter what colour jersey you are wearing. Where are we, as a team, faltering, it’s been very consistent in Test matches of course the batting has not been able to be making an impact or we are unable to get the required breakthroughs. We saw that in the T20 World Cup and the WTC final as well. So, it’s different in every contest. But at the end of the day, I do agree that when we look back at the cabinet of the ICC tournaments, they are very far and few. We need to do a lot of things right, both men’s and women’s teams and pretty quickly to get that habit of winning ICC trophies.
Does the Indian men’s team require a major change with the seniors making way for young talents?
It’s been a discussion and a debate that will never die. Do we not need experience, do we not youth, how do we balance… and the common statement is the balance between youth and experience. You can’t say, “Thank you very much. We’ve had you for over the years but now we don’t need you. We’ve got youth coming in." The youth will also take the same amount of time that an experienced player had taken to be there. If you think it’s that easy, then you would run the country with youngsters around and not many experienced guys.
So, I don’t think that really works. You have to have that balance. Yes, you will have young players coming through – Shubman has come through, and so did Shardul and Siraj. The younger lot will keep coming through. It’s all about taking those opportunities and delivering at the right time. And if you talk about experience, Cheteshwar Pujara has been playing in England for the last three months through the season. So, who faltered, and what went wrong… a lot of things can be discussed. What happens in England, who doesn’t know that? Everyone knows everything. But knowledge is one thing and putting it into practice to get the desired result is another, which will not change, just like the debate about making way for the younger lot.
Do you also think Ashwin should’ve been there in the Playing XI?
Absolutely! I definitely felt that. In fact, my playing XI did have Ashwin there. I’m not saying that you can’t play four pacers, it’s nothing of that sort but I always felt that irrespective of the conditions, had India lost the toss and we were asked to bat, we would have struggled to think, ‘Oh! Now what do we do?’ I’m pretty sure that the team management thought through the decision. The people who make decisions would have given it a thought that whether they need to have 4 seamers or a combination of 3 seamers and 2 spinners. They felt they wanted to have four seamers and they went ahead with that.
In my view, I’m sitting far away from The Oval pitch, and have not seen the conditions or the weather. I’m only looking at a green top which says, “4 seamers." That’s what they went for. But as a player, I would have always kept Ashwin in that line-up, just because, I think he is a quality bowler and irrespective of the conditions, he can deliver the good. And he’s absolutely in isolation, just looking at his skill level and the records the Indian team has had with him in the playing XI.
Given that the Indian batting faltered in a big game against the Aussies, was Rishabh Pant a big miss for India?
He’s obviously a massive miss. But let’s not be unfair to KS Bharat. I thought he kept really well. That was his primary job – to keep wickets and he did it very well. If we say that we have to rely on his batting and because we didn’t have that kind of a performance that Rishabh Pant could provide the team, then I think, we are probably looking at it in a wrong manner. We have a top-order that is supposed to bat, a middle-order which is supposed to support and a lower-order which requires to just assist. If you turn things around then you are reading things in the wrong way. Having said that, Rishabh is a quality player and the sooner he comes back, it’s better for him, for fans like me and for everyone around.
Final question, both our men’s and women’s teams have been getting outsmarted in ICC knockouts for a long time now. As a former cricketer and ex-India captain, how do you think this trend can be changed?
It has to change. You don’t want to continue with the trend of losing ICC events. For us, it has gone very long. From 1983 to 2011 was a huge gap. Meanwhile, we had a 2007 and then we got an Under-19 Women’s ICC trophy which is good. As a former player and broadcaster, obviously, I would want this trend to change. I’m hoping that it changes faster than it was when the men won the world cup. The women haven’t won it yet.
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