Former Indian women’s team captain Shantha Rangaswamy believes opening batter Smriti Mandhana is the ideal candidate to take over India’s Test and ODI captain in the near future when the great Mithali Raj eventually calls it a day.
Raj has been India’s longstanding captain in the two longer versions of the game, with explosive middle-order batter Harmanpreet Kaur doing the leadership job in T20Is. But with Raj, the great batter, now approaching the twilight phase of her career, the excitement around her future replacement is already quite rife among the Indian fans.
Harmanpreet is a player of great stature within the Indian dressing room and has been leading the T20I side since 2016. But her worrying inconsistency with the bat in this phase has seen her slip below when it comes to the captaincy talk.
This is where Mandhana has been doing her chances no form by performing consistently in all formats as a top-order batter for India. And thus, Rangaswamy believes, time is ripe to consider her as the next India captain for Tests and ODIs.
“Smriti is the ideal choice after Mithali retires. She has been an excellent performer for India and should be given the opportunity to lead the country,”
said Rangaswamy, the former skipper and current member of the BCCI apex council, in a conversation with PTI.
She also expressed her view on Harmanpreet’s dipping returns with the bat, saying the captaincy may have started to wear on the batter.
Since her legacy-defining hundred in the semi-final of the 2017 ODI World Cup in the UK, Harmanpreet is averaging 29.70 with a strike-rate of 67.88 across her 30 ODIs for India. In T20Is in this period, she has a strike-rate of only 116.05 with an average of 28.52.
Harmanpreet, though, showed encouraging signs of a return to her best in the recent Women’s Big Bash League in Australia. Playing for the Melbourne Renegades, she made 406 runs at an average of 58 with a strike-rate of 130.96.
Mandhana was only slightly behind in the WBBL run-tally, scoring 377 runs at an average of 34.27 and strike-rate of 130.44 with one hundred and two fifties.
