NEW DELHI: When the phone rang on the eve of the ICC Women’s World Cup final, Harmanpreet Kaur didn’t expect to hear the voice of India’s cricketing god. But it was Sachin Tendulkar himself — calling to share words of wisdom that would help her and her team stay grounded before the biggest match of their lives.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!“The night before the match, Sachin sir called,” Harmanpreet revealed in The ICC Review. “He shared his experience and asked us to keep our balance. When the game is going fast, just slow it down a little. Try and control it because when you go too fast, chances are you can stumble. That’s what we need to avoid.”
The rest, as they say, is history. Five days on from India’s historic triumph over South Africa in Navi Mumbai, Harmanpreet is still coming to terms with the magnitude of what her side achieved.“Whenever we are seeing each other, we are just saying, ‘world champion’. It’s a very different feeling,” she smiled. “My mother and father were there. It was a very special moment to lift the World Cup trophy with them. Since my childhood, they have heard me say that I want to wear India’s jersey, play for the country, lead the team and win the World Cup.”
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Harmanpreet now stands alongside Kapil Dev (1983) and MS Dhoni (2011) as the only Indian captains to lift a senior ODI World Cup — and the first woman to do so. Yet, the skipper admits the reality still hasn’t sunk in.“To be honest, I can’t process this right now,” she said. “Maybe after a few months I’ll realise what we’ve given our country. It still feels like we’ve just won a bilateral series and are heading home.”Reflecting on her team’s success, Harmanpreet was quick to credit Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, and Shafali Verma as the key architects of the win.“Shafali was familiar with the pressure and the stage. When that partnership was building, we gave her an over — and she got us two back-to-back wickets,” she recalled.On Mandhana, she added, “Her contribution will always be remembered. Whenever she bats, we all pray she gets a century — because when she gets runs, everything else just falls into place.”And of Deepti Sharma, the tournament’s standout performer, Harmanpreet said, “All she needed was a push. Somewhere we all felt she was holding herself back. Now she believes — and that belief has changed everything.”
