Harmanpreet Kaur urges Team India to “take responsibility” against Sr…

Dubai [UAE], September 12 (ANI): Indian skipper Harmanpreet Kaur has urged her team to step up and deliver when it matters most as India takes on Sri Lanka in the Women’s Asia Cup final in Dubai on Sunday. mieszalniakolorado.pl

India have been heavily reliant on their opening pair, with Smriti Mandhana contributing 154 runs and Shafali Verma 168 in the tournament. With the title at stake, skipper Harmanpreet will hope the middle order rises to the occasion and shares the scoring burden in the all-important final.

“We know we have such a good batting line-up, and I think when you have such a good batting line-up, it is only about whoever is doing well on that day," Harmanpreet said as per the ICC website.

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“That person should take responsibility and finish the game for the team. I think that is the key on this pitch," she added.

India have found match winners in different players this tournament, which is one aspect that has pleased the captain the most going into the final.

“It is good to see that whoever gets the opportunity is coming up with solid performances," she said. We have managed to get runs on the board, and our bowlers are coming up with some really solid performances. So overall, I’m really happy with the way we have played so far."

Sunday’s final is a repeat of the 2024 showpiece, in which Sri Lanka stunned India to lift the title, and Harmanpreet is bracing for a similarly tough contest.

“I think the last time we played against Sri Lanka, they came up with some really solid plans and performances. Winning in T20 cricket is all about who plays better cricket on the day," Harmanpreet said. (ANI)

(This content is sourced from a syndicated feed and is published as received. The Tribune assumes no responsibility or liability for its accuracy, completeness, or content.)

In exactly two months from now the first season of Test Twenty is about to start. The build up has been strong and there has been a lot of positives for the format from investors in the last few weeks. At the core of it is the parity rule. To ensure that the contribution of the women will be as valuable as the men in deciding the eventual outcome.

As a young lady who has been a part of the trials said to me, “What I score in the morning decides whether he wins in the evening. That’s what attracted me to the format. It gives me agency and it is something that is new. I hope the format takes off for this is no more tokenism”, she said.

Women’s cricket doesn’t lack talent. It lacks enough meaningful, high-quality contests to build depth. Test Twenty addresses that by making the women’s game consequential, not supplemental. The toss determines which gender sets the foundation. Every run, wicket, and decision carries direct consequences for the team’s result. That creates real competitive interdependence, forces equal investment in preparation and coaching, and guarantees that women’s performances shape the match outcome. That’s a bold, credible model for accelerating the growth, competitiveness, and commercial value of women’s cricket.

By linking the women’s innings directly to the men’s and making them co-authors of a single result, Test Twenty has added new layers to team sport. When Indian players set a benchmark and others have to chase or vice versa, you get real match intensity that fast tracks decision making, adaptability, and temperament under lights. That exposure, repeated across franchises and countries, builds a wider base of battle tested women’s cricketers, not just stars, but a competitive middle that narrows gaps between nations and makes one sided scorelines less rather than more likely over time.

If there is one thing that you think the current Asia Cup lacked is competitiveness across teams. Not every team was competitive and it is a natural outcome of the kind of opportunities on offer. It is unfair to even expect the same kind of competitiveness. The women playing for Hong Kong for example do not have the same kind of exposure or match training. They haven’t played quality sides regularly and it starts to show up in tournaments like these. That’s the gap Test Twenty seeks to address. By bringing in talent from across the globe and giving them a level playing field, it helps the sport. May be that’s why you see the kind of excitement from among women that the organisers have repeatedly spoken about. With two months left, it can only get better in the next few weeks.

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The upcoming IND vs AFG T20I series will give better clarity to the fans on the Indian cricket team management’s pecking order with regard to the Sanju Samson vs Vaibhav Sooryavanshi conundrum.

The Indian team management, led by head coach Gautam Gambhir and captain Shreyas Iyer, find themselves in a difficult position of potentially benching either Samson or Sooryavanshi, the sort of match-winners other teams in the world would love to have on their side.

The India vs Afghanistan T20I series will get underway on Sunday in Delhi. On the eve of the 1st T20I, captain Iyer was quizzed on the Samson-Sooryavanshi puzzle. Iyer remained coy on who will play in the opening fixture of the series, hailing the talent that he has at his disposal.

Iyer reckoned it’s a “tight call” for him and Gambhir to make regarding the choice of openers, adding that “whoever gets the opportunity, it’s definitely for the team’s benefit.”

The Indian T20I skipper also assured that whichever opener is benched, he will be given confidence and clarity.

Logic dictates that you run back to Sanju Samson: Vivek Razdan

While it’s a tough call to make for the Iyer-Gambhir pair, for veteran commentator Vivek Razdan, Samson should be the definite choice over Sooryavanshi given the former’s memorable exploits at the T20 World Cup 2026.

Speaking on Sony Sports Network, Razdan said, “Out of the four prospects we have for the top order, only three can play. Now the difficulty here is that Sooryavanshi has become such a big name because of social media and his antics during the IPL, there is always talk about him. In my opinion, we need to show a little patience because we are talking about Sanju Samson here. You cannot touch Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan.”

Renowned for calling India’s Gabba 2021 Test victory, Razdan recalled Samson’s famous heroics of three consecutive half-centuries in the T20 World Cup this year, a feat that has etched his name in the hearts of the fans and established his legacy in the annals of Indian cricket.

The revered commentator also pointed out that India’s top 7 is filled with a spate of left-handers – Abhishek, Ishan, Axar, and Tilak along with one or both of Dube and Sundar – which became a problem for India during the T20 WC, prompting the management to bring in Samson, replacing Rinku Singh in the line-up.

“Samson is a player who won India a World Cup a few months back and was the player of the tournament as well. So this becomes a tricky problem. So logic dictates that you run back to Sanju Samson.

“If you look at India’s batting unit, you have Kishan, Axar Patel, Abhishek, and Tilak Varma, who are all left-handers. There’s only Iyer who is a right-hander in there. Also, Samson is not a small name that we are discussing here. So, in my opinion, India should look to start the series with Sanju Samson,” Razdan asserted.

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In his searing examination of human vanity and selfishness in ‘The Fall’, Albert Camus says, “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasure.” I would add anger and grief as the other two human emotions that in their raw expression can be profoundly honest. They strip away the civility and self-consciousness with which we ordinarily present ourselves to the world, revealing something closer to the self beneath the performance.

Two recent images — one fuelled by anger, the other of grief provoked by empathy — have prompted this philosophical introspection into human behaviour. In these moments, the mask of our conditioned existence slips and something more elemental gets revealed.

The first image, a distasteful one, is that of a batsman so outraged by a comment from the bowler that he risks a full-blown fight on the cricket field. He almost replicates Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt, though wisdom dawns at the moment of contact and he retreats before completing the act.

The second is a poignant moment that reveals a gentler side of our nature. Remember Javed Miandad, the battle-scarred veteran, a formidable foe who, in his days of glory, produced many masterly performances and is remembered as much for his grit as for his impishness, which so often riled his opponents. Watching him break down on Pakistani television while pleading for justice for his former teammate Imran Khan, languishing in jail, must have moved even the most stone-hearted critic of Pakistan’s charismatic former captain and Prime Minister.

In these two contrasting expressions of overboard aggression and human vulnerability lies a world held prisoner by uncontrollable emotions that surface in moments of extreme provocation.

Yashasvi Jaiswal is a batsman of abundant talent, striking flair and fearless intent. But the sports field is not an arena where physical strength can be unleashed to inflict body blows on an opponent. Surely, something nasty must have been said to Jaiswal by the Sri Lankan bowler for him to lose his cool and attempt a head butt. Had he not stopped at the last second to complete his misadventure, cricket would have shamed itself.

In the heat of the moment, people do the strangest things, exposing a side of themselves one would have never associated with them. It is in the aftermath, when calm descends and reflection takes over, that one feels the weight of one’s actions.

One would have thought Jaiswal would feel remorse rather than justify his behaviour by invoking his country, saying that India knows how to “give it back”. It is a reflection of the chest-thumping echo chamber we live in that Jaiswal felt emboldened to defend himself in the name of his country. In doing so, however, all he achieved was to embarrass the proud nation he represents.

While Jaiswal avoided a disastrous ending to his dangerous intentions, Zidane, France and world football’s towering, magisterial figure, executed a violent act of almost venomous force, smashing his head into Italy’s Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final.

Interestingly, though Zidane profusely apologised for his shocking act that dented his image of a calm, reflective man, he maintained that the slur against his family had left him with little choice. “I would have preferred to be punched than hear my family being abused,” he said later.

What is even more intriguing is that his reaction to the slur was not a spontaneous retaliation. Zidane walked away, apparently controlling himself, but then decided that he had to react in the violent manner he finally did. His subsequent apology for the physical aggression alongside his insistence that he had to do what he did, raised questions of ethics, morality, accountability and consequences that severely test the accepted codes of social conduct.

In those brief seconds when body and mind revolt and become prisoners of an uncontrollable, incendiary emotion, the conditioned self breaks free and acts as it wishes and desires. It is a freedom we would never wish to experience, for it compels us to break free from the chains of civilisational restraint. No amount of remorse can undo the damage caused, not only to the recipient of our ire but to ourselves as well.

While anger ignites the destructive self, sorrow and grief can act as a balm, healing wounds even as overwhelming emotion inflicts immense mental agony and pain on our conscious and sub-conscious self.

In Miandad’s almost whispering, pleading voice, weighed down by tears of helplessness, was a cry for help for a rare sporting idol incarcerated for years for a crime more political than criminal in intent. The universality of his emotion struck a deep emotional chord across national loyalties. The earnestness of his appeal laid bare his raw, emotional upheaval, the pain and trauma caused by what he perceived as an injustice being done to his mentor Imran Khan.

In that moment of grief, Miandad connected with a world where empathy matters more than revenge, reminding us of the richness of human emotion, a richness that the use of force stoked by anger can erode and hollow us from within. In this theatre of the absurd, where morality and ethics are hostage to our ideological moorings, only empathy can rescue us from becoming prisoners of our afflicted emotions.

— The writer is the author of ‘Not Quite Cricket’ and ‘Not Just Cricket’