History repeated itself and Harmanpreet Kaur's brigade yet again perished at the big stage as they succumbed to Australia by five runs in the Women's T20 World Cup semifinals on Thursday (February 23). India's defeat paved the way for the defending champions Australia to storm into the Women's T20 World Cup final for the seventh successive time.
While chasing Australia's 173-run target, India got off to a shoddy start as they were wobbling at 28/3. Then skipper Harmanpreet Kaur (52 off 34) paired up with Jemimah Rodrigues (43 off 24) to stitch together a 69-run stand to bring India in the game. But India failed to continue the momentum as Rodrigues first returned to the hut and then in a bizarre run out Harmanpreet was sent to the pavilion and India eventually lost the match.
Meanwhile, Rodrigues rued India's loss but but the star batter wants to count on the positives and sees India's team ruling the game in the upcoming time. Indian women's team has seen a massive progress in the last few years. However, they lost the ODI World Cup final to England in 2017, the 2020 T20 World Cup final to Australia and the 2022 CWG final to Australia in Birmingham.
"I think this team has been showing a lot of promise, we are pushing and pushing and we know something big is coming. What is in our hands is to keep working harder and keep trusting. We know when it's our time, nobody can stop this team. This team is going to dominate for ages," Rodrigues said.
While lauding the youngsters like Richa Ghosh, Rodrigues said India will definitely upstage Australia in near future.
"The first one will be the rise of youngsters like Richa. This Indian team is searching for a finisher and she could be the one, and she is actually the one for us. This team shows a lot of promise. And if you go to see how the average age is, it's around 24, so I imagine that we'll be giving this Australian team competition a few years down the line," she said.
"Honestly its not sunk in still. Everyone was quiet in the dressing room. It will take us some time. What we discussed was to have the right intent and cricket is a game that anything can happen. We are not really focussed on the results, we are focussed on the process but things didn't go our way.
"Few unfortunate run outs ... but it teaches you that failure is not failure, it's actually a learning. We will take a lot of learning from this and we promised we are going to work hard," she concluded.
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