Pratika Rawal has arrived like a breath of fresh air to Indian women cricket’s firmament. More than anything else, the 25-year-old Delhi girl has placed a high value on her wicket and has been consistent in the 23 one-day internationals she has played in less than a year. She has already flayed the bowlers for 1110 runs with a strike rate of 82.84 and with two centuries and seven half-centuries.

The discerning and the newbie fan of women’s cricket would have been impressed by the numbers she has delivered. It has been extraordinary to say in the least.

She is a right-hander and with a lefty maestro in Smriti Mandhana, the team has benefited a lot with the two amassing 1799 runs since December 2024 when Rawal joined forces with Mandhana for the first time against the West Indies at Bardoa Cricket Association’s new world class stadium in Kotambi. The opening pair’s contribution is a fraction lower than 28 per cent of the runs made by the team in the last ten months.

Rawal hails from a city in India that has a legacy of promoting cricket. The success of great players like Virendra Sehwag and Virat Kohli and others, such as Shikhar Dhawan and Ishant Sharma, has triggered interest among the youth in the capital city of Delhi. She has given the impression of having gone through a solid grounding as an opening batter; not many would be happy and wanting to face the new ball hurled at speeds around 110 kmph, but the right-hander has been put through the rigours as a result of which she has shown the skill and knack to deal with the medium-fast and seamers of the rival teams with a degree of ease and confidence.

Rawal has come into the team at the expense of Shafali Varma whose style of responding to the new ball operators was like ``throwing caution to the wind.”Varma held her own from June 27, 2021 to October 209, 2024 and in a little over three years, she gathered eyeballs, but her none-too-impressive numbers in 2024 – 101 runs in five matches in comparison to 367 runs in 15 matches in 2022 – warranted a change at the top the selectors were keen to make. They and the team looked for someone who resembled a conventional opener with proper technique. The selectors could not ignore her claim for an India exposure; she has scored 1037 runs for Delhi, 173 for North Zone and 158 for Railways in the limited-over tournaments. In fact, she has been prolific in the BCCI’s domestic tournaments for women since her first season in 2021-22.

Rawal possesses all qualities for an opener – calm, composed and showing game awareness and also the ability to play strokes in front of the wicket and also cross-batted shots. The selectors tried out Assam’s Uma Chetry in the Twenty20 format; a success in the seven matches she played may have encouraged the selectors to field her in the ODI format. But she was found wanting and the selectors gave the breakthrough to Rawal who has not looked back, scoring 134 in her debut series against the West Indies and 310 against Ireland. She was not spectacular in England and against Australia in the recent three-match series leading to the World Cup, but the quality she brought to the table was a giveaway that she was going to be part and parcel of the team for many years to come.

Rawal has scored 308 runs in six World Cup matches so far – the second highest after Mandhana - with a high of 122 against New Zealand in the crucial league match at the D.Y.Patil Stadium. At the pre-match (v New Zealand) press conference, the team’s head coach Amol Muzumdar brushed off views that her scoring rate has not been up to the mark.

A significant development following her selection has been the opening pair’s capacity to contribute a high volume of runs --- two double century partnerships (233 against Ireland at Rajkot in 212 against New Zealand in the ongoing World Cup at the D.Y. Patil Stadium) and five century-plus stands. In 23 matches she has hit 129 x 4s and ten x 6s, which means that 576 runs of her aggregate of 1110 having come in boundary shots. During the same period Mandhana has struck 222 boundary shots (188 x 4s and 34 x 6s).

Clearly the Mandhana-Rawal opening pair is all set to add a lot more to their present collection. It has taken around two decades and more --- after the Anju Jain/ Jaya Sharma pair (1229 in 27 matches) and Karuna Jain and Jaya Sharma pair (1169 in 25 matches) – for a new India opening pair to dominate the bowlers. Mandhana and other partners like Sushma Verma, Jemima Rodrigues and Poonam Raut have raised 500 plus runs each, but Rawal has turned out to be the game changer at the top. Mandhana will continue to be in the vanguard, but Rawal has truly arrived in the international scene and ready to take on the world.

Rawal has at least two more matches (last league match against Bangladesh and the semi-final) to showcase her talent. She has already scored a ton at the D. Y. Patil Stadium and would have known the behaviour of the surface to score runs. It was a featherbed created by the BCCI curator for the match against New Zealand, and it should be much the same for the match against Bangladesh, which boasts of a fine spin attack.

Rawal attributed her success to the team environment. ``The environment in the dressing room is amazing. The kind of support that I get from my teammates and the coaches is just commendable. It’s because of them that I'm able to express myself freely on the ground. So, I'm very happy the way everything is working out for us currently. I don't look at milestones. I love to win matches for the team and that's what I do. Obviously playing the World Cup at home is challenging. And then when the team doesn't do too well and loses three games in a row, there’s also talk about your strike rate, and all these things obviously add to a lot of pressure for a young cricketer,’’ said Rawal who took just 23 matches to log in her first 1000 runs in ODIs --- a record for Indian women’s cricket, the same number of matches as Australian Lindsay Reeler.