Jemimah Rodrigues becomes star after her heroics help India to seal thrilling seven-wicket win over Pak

Cape Town, Feb 13: In a major nail-biting match, Richa Ghosh's 31*(20) and Jemimah Rodrigues' 53*(38) heroics helped India to register a thrilling seven-wicket victory against Pakistan in the ongoing Women's T20 World Cup.

 

Coming to the match, Pakistan put on a total of 149/4 in 20 overs after electing to bat first. After the team was reduced to 68/4 in 12.1 overs, it was skipper Bismah Maroof (68* off 55 balls) and Ayesha Naseem (43* off 25 balls) which pulled back Pakistan into the contest with an 81-run stand for the fifth wicket.

 

 

Spinner Radha Yadav (2/21) was the pick of the bowlers for India. All-rounder Deepti Sharma also picked up one wicket. Chasing 150, opener Shafali Verma (33 off 25 balls) played a solid knock to provide a good start to Women in Blue's run-chase. Yastika Bhatia (17) and skipper Harmanpreet Kaur (16) failed to make much impact with the bat. India was left in a tricky situation at 93/3 in 13.3 overs.

 

 

From there, Jemimah teamed up with wicketkeeper-batter Richa Ghosh and won the game for India. Richa played a hard-hitting cameo of 31* in just 20 balls, which provided great support to Jemimah's anchoring effort.

 

With this, India completed the second-highest run chase in the history of the tournament. The highest run chase was pulled off by England against Australia in 2009, when the former chased down the target of 164 runs set by the Aussies. Nashra Sandhu took 2/15 in four overs. Sadia Iqbal also picked up 1/25 in four overs.

 

Jemimah was the 'Player of the Match' for her half-century.

 

The 22-year-old was quoted as saying by ICC after the match: "India vs Pakistan matches are always a little bit more special - we spoke about it in the team meeting. Growing up we always watched these matches. I remember watching the match at the MCG where Virat Kohli played such an extraordinary knock. We did speak about it but we also just wanted to go out there and put our first win on the board. We just wanted to go out, play the same cricket and with the same intensity as usual."

 

"I knew we had to build partnerships, and I knew if we took it deep we will win. We knew they would bowl a bad ball eventually and we would capitalise - it was a difficult wicket but being set helped. This was a team effort. We will let the win sink in, but the tournament has just begun. We want to do the simple things correctly and then the results will take care of themselves," added the batter.