NAVI MUMBAI: A home World Cup final against South Africa. 40,000 fans making the Stadium seem like a circular wall of blue. You are taking guard for only the second time in the tournament after having come in as an injury replacement. What would you do? It is not a hard guess for most batters in the world. Try and soak in the moment, get off strike and build an innings.
But most batters are not Shafali Verma, she's sui generis. On Sunday, she took guard against Ayabonga Khaka — a veteran of multiple WCs — and stood still waiting for the seamer to get to the bowling crease. Then came the charge. She walked two steps down the crease and creamed the full delivery in the air between point and cover point. Right at that moment, the blue touchpaper was finally lit after the two hour rain delay. Shafali came into the team for this very thing — make an impact.
Against Australia in the semifinal, she was making a comeback into the team after almost a year. Despite the confidence she showed in the pre-match press conference, Shafali seemed nervous. She was stuck in the crease, and it did not take long for Kim Garth to trap her on the pads.
Cut to Sunday, Shafali looked like a different beast. She was in her elements, charging at everything she could to avoid being hit on the pads. She would walk down to defend, play it to cover if needed, and then hold a pose with the straight bat for a couple of seconds. It didn’t matter if the ball had flown for a four or it was hit straight to the fielder; the pose remained. On one such occasion, her batting partner, Smriti Mandhana, almost got run out as Shafali punched the ball towards mid-off and tried to walk to the other end before being sent back.
That perhaps was the difference. Bringing the bat down straight — something head coach Amol Muzumdar seemed to be talking with her about before the semifinal — and defending good balls with confidence. For she knew once she gets going, there is no stopping her against this attack. Not even Marizanne Kapp was spared. Shafali charged her for a boundary before getting a ball on the pads, which once again went to the ropes.
South Africa tried everything. Nonkululeko Mlaba was introduced early, and so was Nadine de Klerk. Both of them were taken apart by Shafali, both along the ground and over the boundary ropes. She lofted De Klerk with the straightest bat over mid-off into the sight screen and held the pose for the world to capture it and never forget. It was the kind of shot Sachin Tendulkar, who was watching from the stands, would have been proud of.
So would be her father, Sanjeev Verma, watching her on the television back home in Rohtak. It hadn’t been an easy year for him or Shafali. She got dropped from the team two days after he suffered a heart attack last year, and the road back wasn't easy. She had hidden the information from him — the one person he is closest to — for a week with concern for his health. After all it was Sanjeev who took her to watch Tendulkar bat in his last Ranji game at Lahli, and that marked the beginning of a dream journey.
On Sunday, Shafali got to bat in front of Tendulkar at a World Cup final and she was not going to let the chance go. The 21-year-old launched a calculated counter-attack, rode her luck, registered her highest score across white-ball formats and looked good for a century.
It could well have been a century if Shafali had run a two off a Jemimah Rodrigues cover drive but the pair settled for a single. On the very next ball, she tried to hit Khaka over mid-off, but didn’t get the elevation. A disappointed Shafali had to take the long walk back.
She might have missed out on a World Cup final century but for 78 balls Shafali owned the stage and showed the globe why she is a superstar batter.
