India batter Smriti Mandhana achieved yet another milestone in her career during the World Cup semi-final clash against Australia. He became just the second Indian player after Mithali Raj to complete 1000 runs against Australia in ODIs. Mandhana achieved this feat after opening the batting for the Women in Blue alongside Shafali Verma. Notably, Mithali is still India's highest-scorer against Australia in one-day cricket and has 1123 runs under her name.
Mandhana's stunning form in World Cup
Mandhana has been in top form in the ODI World Cup and has scored a total of 365 runs in seven innings in the tournament so far. The 29-year-old has a century and two fifties under her name and has played a massive role in India's qualification to the semi-finals. In the side's previous match against Australia, she had played a fine inning of 80 runs.
Mandhana has so far played 115 matches in the one-day format, scoring a total of 5253 runs, including 14 centuries and 34 fifties. She has maintained a blistering average of 48.63 in the format and has the highest individual score of 136. She is also the Women in Blue's second-highest run-getter in ODI history only behind Mithali, who scored 7805 runs in 232 matches.
Australia dominate with the bat
Meanwhile, the Australia batters had a field day against India during the World Cup semi-final clash and ended up posting a mammoth total of 338 runs on the board. Notably, this is the highest total ever posted by a team in the knockouts of the Women's World Cup and it certainly won't be easy to chase for the hosts. Phoebe Litchfield was the star performer for Australia and played a stunning knock of 119 runs from only 93 deliveries.
She was accompanied well by both Ellyse Perry and Ashleigh Gardner, who immensely contributed to the side's total with their knocks of 77 and 63 respectively. For India Nallapureddy Charani and Deepti Sharma racked up two scalps each while the likes of Kranti Goud, Amanjot Kaur and Radha Yadav chipped in with a scalp each as they capped off a rather poor bowling display. It remains to be seen if the hosts will manage to chase down the mammoth target or not.