BIRMINGHAM — The over that broke Pakistan was Deepti Sharma’s fourth. Three wickets fell inside it, a chase that had already lost its nerve simply stopped breathing, and a World Cup opener that India had controlled for an hour turned into the kind of result that makes the rest of the group take notice.
By the time she walked off, Sharma had 5 for 10, the best figures any India woman has produced in a Twenty20 international. Pakistan, chasing 171, were bowled out for 106 in the seventeenth over. India won by 64 runs, and on the evidence of a Sunday night at Edgbaston the margin felt generous to the losers.
This is the fixture that does not need a build-up, and India have now won the last several editions of it at World Cups without ever quite making it look routine. The pre-tournament line from captain Harmanpreet Kaur had been about playing fearless cricket rather than carrying the weight of the rivalry. For one night her team did exactly that, and the fear ended up belonging entirely to the other dressing room.
The foundation was Smriti Mandhana’s, as it so often is. She made 68 off 44 balls, the innings that set the ceiling for everything that followed, timing the ball through the off side early and then taking the bowling apart once she had her eye in. Pakistan could not separate her from the strike, and when they finally did the damage was done.
What turned a strong total into an intimidating one was Richa Ghosh at the death. The wicketkeeper hit 34 off 17, the sort of cameo that does not show up as a headline number but adds twenty runs to a total that the opposition then has to chase under lights against a bowling attack that smells blood. India finished on 170 for 6, and Pakistan needed something close to their best to get near it.
They got close to nothing instead. Muneeba Ali made 41 and gave the innings a pulse for a while, but wickets kept falling at the other end, and the required rate climbed into the territory where a T20 chase becomes an exercise in damage control rather than pursuit. Fatima Sana, the Pakistan captain who arrived at this tournament in the form of her career, had taken 2 for 33 with the ball but could do nothing to slow the collapse once it started.
The story of the back half of the innings, though, was Sharma. She had been parsimonious through her first three overs, the kind of slow strangulation that good off spin applies on a surface offering a little grip. Then came the fourth, and three Pakistan batters in succession found ways to get out to her, two of them to deliveries that did just enough off the pitch. Five wickets for ten runs in a World Cup match is the sort of line that gets read out for years afterward, and she walked away with the player-of-the-match award almost as an afterthought.
It is worth being honest about what this result does and does not tell us. Pakistan are not the side India will be measured against. The harder examinations come later in the group and, India hope, in the knockout rounds, against batting line-ups that will not fold the way this one did once the pressure arrived. A spell of 5 for 10 is a record and a thrill, but it is also the kind of figure that comes when an opponent loses its head, and India’s bowling will be asked tougher questions on flatter pitches by teams that bat deeper.
None of which India will care about this week. Tournaments are built on nights like this, on a number-one ranked batter making it look easy and a senior all-rounder producing the spell of her life in the game that the whole subcontinent stops to watch. Their pre-match promise of fearless cricket held up, and the net run rate they have banked could matter a great deal if the group tightens.
There had been a worry, voiced in the days before the match, that the English weather rather than Pakistan might be India’s real opponent in Birmingham. The clouds held off long enough for a full game, and India used every over of it. The tournament itself carries a weight beyond the cricket, too, with several of the women’s game’s founding figures playing their last World Cup this month.
India move on to face the Netherlands at Headingley in Leeds on Wednesday, a fixture that should offer fewer alarms and more batting practice. What they will want to know, and what one game against an overmatched opponent cannot answer, is whether the bowling that throttled Pakistan can do the same to a side that does not panic. They will find out soon enough.
