Cool, calm Mandhana steers India to victory on a raucous and sweltering day at Edgbaston

India (170/6) beat Pakistan (106 all out) by 64 runs

• Smriti Mandhana hits 68 to set up unassailable total

• Deepti Sharma stars with the ball, taking 5/10

• Muneeba Ali top scores for Pakistan before being run out by Deepti

• 18,814 spectators is a record attendance for a World Cup group game

On a warm, sun-drenched afternoon in Birmingham the residents of the Soho Road and Smethwick High Street gathered alongside the residents of the Stratford Road and the Alum Rock Road to celebrate the diverse cultures of our city. Birmingham is the birth place of the balti, that peak of Kashmiri cuisine, traditionally cooked by Asian-run restaurants and consumed by everyone in the city as our own signature dish. It is a place where children of all backgrounds and heritage grow up together, sit beside one another in school, learn to respect and value each other’s cultures and religions and play games together.

It was an apt place for India’s women to play Pakistan’s women in this most highly charged of matches between two great rivals. In the Eric Hollies Stand, Indian families sat alongside Pakistani families. Grand-parents, parents and children shrieked for joy at every single scored, exploded in rapture for every wicket taken and caused seismic activity on the Richter Scale when a six was hit.

Truly, this should have been the opening game of the tournament. The atmosphere was a hundred times louder and more excited than for the England v Sri Lanka game. The crowd was much bigger – almost 19,000 people crammed inside the three open sides of Edgbaston Stadium (the fourth side currently being turned into a new stand with hotel complex.)

Venturing into the Hollies Stand was an amazing experience. I realise that even though I think I know my friends and colleagues of Asian heritage, I do not fully understand the lived experience of being a British Asian watching your cricket team play against their biggest rivals. It was part carnival, part proxy war between two nuclear powers, but without a hint of menace or enmity anywhere.

On the field, it was a game where the pendulum of fortune swung back and forth many times, but eventually India’s superiority in all three areas of the game ensured a comfortable victory. Winning the toss and batting, Shafali Verma produced the most Shefali innings of her career.

Facing the world number two bowler, Sadia Iqbal, she hit the first ball of the game for six, swung at and missed the next three balls, and finally edged her fifth ball into the grateful gloves of Muneeba Ali. Jemimah Rodrigues, who often bats as low as five, suddenly found herself batting in the first over of the game. By the fourth over, she too had departed, having hit the ball stratospherically high, but not very far, the resulting catch was spilt and juggled by Natalia Parvaiz until, spurred on by the thought of a billion pairs of mocking eyes, she dived forward and pouched the ball before it hit the turf.

Watching her partners self-destruct from the non-striker’s end was the ever-calm Smriti Mandhana. Now paired with her captain Harmanpreet Kaur, the two of them re-built the innings slowly, striking at a run a ball for the first nine overs, then quickly adding 50 runs in four overs in the middle phase, Sadia Iqbal targeted for particular punishment. Mandhana’s innings was not chance-free - she was dropped twice on her way to 68 from 44 balls, her 11 boundaries more than Pakistan as a team would be able to muster in their reply.

Her departure, followed by the end of Harmanpreet’s more sedate run-a-ball innings, set up the explosive finish that India were looking for, as Tasmia Rubab crumbled under the pressure in the 19^th over, despatched for five boundaries by Deepti Sharma and Richa Ghosh as her six balls cost Pakistan 23 runs, and Pakistan captain Fatima Sana conceded 15 more runs from the 20^th over, including 7 wides. India’s final total of 170 was about 20 more runs than Pakistan would have been hoping for and reduced their victory chances from improbable to impossible.

Pakistan’s reply was undermined and then destroyed by Deepti Sharma. Her first three overs went for a miserly eight runs and resulted in the wickets of Gull Feroza and Ayesha Zafar. Her run out of Pakistan’s top scorer Muneeba Ali in the 11^th over, firing in a direct hit from backward point, effectively ended the game as a contest and then she came back on to bowl in the 17^th over, mopping up the Pakistan tailenders with three wickets in five balls to give India a convincing victory.

Pakistan’s batters walked from the field disconsolate. India’s fielders celebrated alongside their joyful and highly vocal supporters, many of whom were still at the ground an hour later, desperately hoping for a selfie or an autograph, or just to sense the aura of these superstars close up with a high five or a handshake.

The Pakistan cricketers, of course, were denied any such courtesy. As my Indian colleague in the press box put it, the only India-Pakistan handshakes happening today were the ones exchanged between him and his friend, who happens to be a Pakistani journalist. The irony of course is that many of these players used to be friends before the Indian team were banned from any friendly interaction with their counterparts by powerful men whose interest is only to stoke the fires of disharmony and do not see sport as a bridge, but rather as another weapon in their very modern hybrid warfare.

As the Hollies stand emptied, grandmothers in saris and grandmothers in hijabs accompanied sons, daughters and grandchildren to the exits, faces bright and beaming, conversation animated as all present basked in the warm evening sunlight and soaked in the final moments of the carnival atmosphere. Ordinary British Indians and British Pakistanis side by side, each celebrating their heritage, their different cultures, their roots, without animosity or threat or danger. 

As spectators filed out, on the forecourt at Edgbaston was a sight I had never seen before at a cricket ground – a baby buggy park with dozens and dozens of prams parked up waiting for their owners and occupants to return. And somehow, and I can’t explain this, it gave me hope.