November 2, 2025, will go down as a landmark day in the annals of Indian cricket in general and Indian women’s cricket in particular for the incredible ODI World Cup victory achieved by Harmanpreet Kaur & Co. at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.
Women’s cricket in India, which forever remained the poorer cousin of its men’s counterpart, had its ‘1983’ moment when Team India beat the gutsy South Africa team in the summit clash by 52 runs.
To understand the enormity of the victory and put things in perspective, the viewership of the 2025 Women’s World Cup final, which India won, equalled the streaming viewership record of 185 million users on JioHotstar set by the 2024 Men’s T20 World Cup final, where the Indian men had emerged champions.
It was unthinkable and unfathomable at one point to even imagine Indian women’s cricket getting the kind of attention and traction that it is getting today.
However, the journey has been a long and arduous one, and the absolute high of that heady night at the DY Patil has been a culmination of years of agonising failures that the team faced collectively and individual players, who struggled to see a better day for themselves and the team as a whole.
This was India’s third World Cup final after defeats in the 2017 ODI World Cup final in England and the 2020 T20 World Cup summit clash in Australia.
For a team that had tasted the mental agony of losing two World Cup finals, it’s never easy to bury those ghosts when the odds are stacked against the side, but India’s women cricketers finally attained glory like they truly belonged.
Midway through the tournament, when Pratika Rawal was ruled out for the knockout stages of the global championship, there was serious concern in certain quarters as to how India would cope with the pressure of a semifinal and a final.
Losing a form player like Pratika may have dented their plans a bit, but the replacement was the prodigious Shafali Verma, who was not part of the initial 15-member squad for the World Cup.
The Rohtak-born Shafali then went about her business in clinical fashion and rose to the occasion like a phoenix in the final against South Africa, where she struck a crucial 87 as India batted first and then scalped two wickets in defence of 299.
From the days of Diana Edulji and Shanta Rangaswamy, when the Indian women’s cricket team competed hard at the international arena but in a realistic sense were just also-rans, to being the World Champions of today, it’s been quite a journey.
From Diana Edulji being told in 2011 by a former Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) president that if he had his way he wouldn’t allow women’s cricket to happen to becoming a force to reckon with in its own right, Indian women’s cricket has well and truly arrived with a World Cup trophy in hand finally.
Unearthing players of the likes of Jemimah Rodrigues, Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, Richa Ghosh, Pratika Rawal and Amanjot Kaur has a lot to do with the BCCI’s Women’s Premier League (WPL), which started in 2023.
The WPL has been a game changer, as it is modelled on the likes of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which catapulted Indian cricket to the next dimension when it launched in 2008 after India’s 2007 T20 World Cup victory.
The WPL effect on Indian women’s cricket has been unmistakable, as the Indian players coming from the grassroots have been able to rub shoulders with the best in the business, with players from all across the world featuring in it.
The likes of Nat Sciver-Brunt, Ellyse Perry, Alyssa Healy, Annabel Sutherland, and Hayley Mathews have brought a lot to the table with their class, technique, and style, influencing and inspiring Indian players.
India clinching the ODI World Cup title after three WPL seasons is a testament to the huge influence the league had on the players’ growth and development in terms of skills, exposure, confidence, etc.
One of the major factors in India’s incredible World Cup victory has to undoubtedly be the man at the helm of affairs, Amol Muzumdar, the head coach of the team.
The Mumbaikar, who had a storied first-class career himself, is a man who only truly understands the sweetness of success after the long bitterness and despair of failures.
The role of a coach is immense in any team sport, and for a group of women thirsty for international success and a world title, Muzumdar came to the fore in October 2023.
From stories of being padded up all day and waiting for his chance to bat in the Harris Shield while Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli batted their way to a record 664-run partnership to scoring 260 in the Ranji Trophy in his debut in 1994 and scoring 11,000 FC runs and yet never making it to the Indian team, Muzumdar had an incomplete story when it came to cricket.
Perhaps, even he would have seldom imagined that the finest and greatest moment of his professional cricket career (as player or coach) would come when he would coach the Indian women’s cricket team to World Cup glory on home soil.
Images of Harmanpreet Kaur kneeling down to touch Muzumdar’s feet to seek his blessings have now become iconic across various spectrums of the media, while the homecoming he received when he returned to his Vile Parle residence in Mumbai is now the stuff of legend.
Haridev Pushparaj, Sports Editor, The Free Press Journal.
