India Women's Cricket: How the Team Was Built

On 2 November 2025 India's women won a fifty-over World Cup at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, beating South Africa by 52 runs in a rain-delayed final in front of 39,555 people. Shafali Verma made 87 from 78 balls and was named player of the match. Deepti Sharma made 58 and then took five for 39. Laura Wolvaardt was dismissed for 101 and South Africa were bowled out for 246.

Forty-nine years earlier the same national side had played its first international at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore, a Test against the West Indies that started on 31 October 1976 and finished drawn. The captain was Shantha Rangaswamy, who made 74 in that match. The Women's Cricket Association of India, which had put the team together, was three years old.

What sits between those two dates is not a straight line of improvement. It is a series of distinct sides with distinct methods — a spin-first Test team in the 1970s, a batting side in the 1980s, a two-player team for much of the 2000s, a power-hitting white-ball unit after 2017 — separated by long stretches when India played almost no cricket at all. The institutional and administrative story is set out separately in the guide to India women's cricket history. This page is about how the cricket itself changed.

A team assembled before there was a system

The Women's Cricket Association of India was formed in 1973, and it built a national side the only way available to it: by asking around. There was no age-group structure, no contract list, no national academy. Players came from a handful of cities where a few schools and colleges ran women's teams, and the association's early work was as much about persuading grounds to host matches as about selection.

The consequence for the cricket was straightforward. The 1976-77 series against the West Indies ran to six Tests, drawn 1-1, and India's win came at the Moin-ul-Haq Stadium in Patna. Six Tests in a debut season is a workload no modern women's side approaches; India have not played six Tests in any five-year period since. The players were amateurs taking leave from jobs and courses, and the schedule was built on the assumption that a tour was a rare thing that should therefore be long.

Edulji, Rangaswamy and the left-arm habit

The bowling of that first generation was slow and it was accurate, and it was built around Diana Edulji's left-arm spin. Edulji played across two decades, captained the side, and remained India's most experienced bowler long after she had stopped. Shubhangi Kulkarni bowled off-spin alongside her. Sudha Shah and Rangaswamy did much of the batting.

The method suited the surfaces. Indian pitches of the period offered a slow bowler grip and very little to anyone trying to move the ball, and a women's Test in Nagpur or Patna in December was a match in which two spinners bowling forty overs each was normal rather than a tactic. That preference did not come from nowhere — it is the same inheritance described in the guide to India's spin bowling tradition, arriving in the women's game through the same clubs and the same coaches.

It also produced a specific weakness. When India toured, the ball moved and the spinners were less effective, and the side had almost no seam bowling to fall back on. That gap took thirty years to close properly.

Sandhya Agarwal at Worcester, and the batting the 1980s produced

India's 1986 tour of England produced the best individual batting of the amateur era. Sandhya Agarwal made 132 in the second Test at Blackpool and then 190 in the third at Worcester, which took the record for the highest score in a women's Test from Betty Snowball's 189, made in 1935. Agarwal's record lasted a year before Denise Annetts passed it. She finished that series with 359 runs, more than any other batter on either side. Diana Edulji captained India in two of those Tests.

The 190 mattered beyond the record because of what it demonstrated. A batter raised on slow home pitches had gone to England and occupied the crease for a day and a half against seam and swing. India's problem in that period was never that its best batters lacked technique; it was that there were very few of them and they played very rarely.

The gap years, and what the fixture list did to selection

Between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s India's women played international cricket in bursts. There were seasons with no Test at all and years with a handful of one-day matches. India had hosted the World Cup in 1978, which gave the side its first one-day internationals, and hosted it again in 1997, but tournament cricket every four years is not a development programme.

Selection under those conditions becomes conservative in a particular way. A player picked for a tour and left out of the next one might wait three years for another chance, so squads tended to be chosen on reputation as much as form, and careers were long and thin — twenty caps spread across a decade. It is the opposite of the churn a crowded calendar produces, and it made the side harder to rebuild than it should have been. The competitions that eventually fixed this are covered in the guide to women's domestic cricket in India.

Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami as a working pair

Mithali Raj made 214 against England at Taunton in 2002, aged nineteen, passing Karen Rolton's mark for the highest score in a women's Test at the time. Jhulan Goswami began playing for India in the same period and went on to become the leading wicket-taker in women's international cricket, with 353 wickets across 283 matches, and the first bowler to reach 250 in one-day internationals.

The pair mattered structurally as well as statistically. Goswami gave India something it had never had: a genuinely fast opening bowler who could take wickets on flat pitches and abroad. Raj gave the middle order an anchor who could bat through fifty overs. For most of the 2000s the plan was visible from the first over — Goswami and one other seamer up front, spin through the middle, Raj to hold the innings together.

That plan reached a final. India lost the 2005 World Cup final to Australia at SuperSport Park in Centurion on 10 April, bowled out for 117 in reply to 215 for 4 after Karen Rolton made 107 not out. Raj was captain. Later in 2006 India won a Test at Taunton on their tour of England, and in November of that year the Women's Cricket Association of India was absorbed into the BCCI, bringing the women's team inside the structure described in the guide to BCCI structure.

Derby 2017, and the arrival of power hitting

The single most consequential innings in the history of the side was played at Derby in July 2017. India needed to beat Australia to reach a World Cup final, and Harmanpreet Kaur made 171 not out from 115 balls. India won by 36 runs. Four days later they lost the final to England at Lord's by nine runs in front of a near-capacity crowd of around 24,000.

Two things followed. The first was commercial and cultural: the final was watched in India on a scale nothing in women's cricket had previously reached, and the side stopped being a curiosity in its own country.

The second was technical. Kaur's innings was not an anchor's innings. It was hitting — down the ground, over midwicket, at a rate no Indian woman had sustained in a knockout match. Selection shifted towards batters who could do that. Smriti Mandhana was already established at the top. Shafali Verma came in as a teenager playing the same way. By the 2020 Twenty20 World Cup final at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, played before 86,174 spectators, India were a side that intended to score quickly and sometimes failed rather than a side that intended to survive. Australia won that match, and India lost the Commonwealth Games gold-medal match in Birmingham in 2022 by nine runs, also to Australia. The pattern of reaching finals and losing them held a while longer, and the tournament records are collected at the Twenty20 World Cup.

Fielding, fitness and the change nobody photographed

The least visible shift is the one that changed most matches. Through the 2000s India's ground fielding was ordinary and its running between wickets was worse, and both cost real runs in matches decided by twenty.

Three things altered it. Central contracts and a national fitness programme after the BCCI merger made a professional standard enforceable. The October 2022 decision to pay women the same match fees as men for international cricket — fifteen lakh rupees for a Test, six for a one-day international, three for a Twenty20 international — removed the need for players to hold other jobs. And the arrival of the Women's Premier League in March 2023 put Indian players in dressing rooms alongside Australian and English professionals for a month a year, which did more for fielding standards than any camp.

The evidence is in the catching. India's 2025 World Cup campaign included boundary catches and direct-hit run-outs of a kind the side simply did not produce fifteen years earlier.

The red-ball fortnight of December 2023

India's Test cricket had almost disappeared, and then in the space of a fortnight the side won two of the most one-sided women's Tests played anywhere. At the DY Patil Stadium they beat England by 347 runs. At the Wankhede Stadium, from 21 to 24 December 2023, they beat Australia by eight wickets, chasing 75 in under nineteen overs. Sneh Rana took seven wickets in the match and was named player of the match; Rajeshwari Gayakwad bowled alongside her. It was India's first Test win over Australia in eleven attempts stretching back to 1977.

Those two results are worth noting for what they were built on: spin, on home surfaces, exactly as in 1976. The difference was that the batting could now score at four an over in a Test, which meant India had time to bowl a side out twice. The venues involved are described in the guide to India's Test cricket grounds.

Navi Mumbai, and what the title actually rewarded

The 2025 campaign was not a procession. India lost three consecutive league matches, to South Africa, Australia and England, and were close to elimination. The semi-final against Australia was won by five wickets in a record chase built on Jemimah Rodrigues making 127 not out from 134 balls, which ended a run of fifteen consecutive Australian wins at fifty-over World Cups.

The final, three days later, was won by the two things India had spent twenty years acquiring. Shafali Verma's 87 was the power-hitting inheritance from Derby. Deepti Sharma's five for 39 was the spin inheritance from Edulji. India's wider record across the competition, men's side included, is set out in the guide to India at the World Cup, and the tournament's own honour board is at the fifty-over World Cup.

What the next side has to solve

Three problems are open.

Test cricket remains scarce. India played two Tests in a fortnight in 2023 and then very little; a side cannot build red-ball batters on that diet, and the Wankhede win was achieved by players who had almost no first-class cricket behind them.

Fast bowling depth is thin. Renuka Singh Thakur and a small group behind her carry the seam attack, and the domestic system still produces far more slow bowlers than quick ones — the same imbalance the men's game has, for much the same reasons.

And the base is narrower than the crowd at Navi Mumbai suggested. The Women's Premier League has five teams and a squad limit, and the number of Indian women earning a full living from cricket is still measured in the low hundreds. Widening that is the work of the next decade, and it runs through the state associations described across the cricket in India hub rather than through the national side.

Sources and method

Match details, dates, venues, scores and individual figures here come from scorecards and match reports published by the ICC and the tournament organisers, from the BCCI's own announcements on contracts and match fees, and were cross-checked against ESPNcricinfo and Cricbuzz scorecards where a figure needed confirmation. Records described as records — highest Test score, leading wicket-taker — are stated as they stood at the point described in the text, not as current standings.

The era divisions, and the judgements about method, selection and what changed the side, are an editorial reading of that record rather than a computed result. Where the evidence is thin, particularly for the 1980s and 1990s when India played little international cricket and coverage was sparse, the page says less rather than filling the gap.