THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: India’s women swept Sri Lanka 4–0 with the authority of a team several rungs above their opponents. Runs flowed freely, wickets fell on demand, and results were rarely in doubt. Yet, amid the boundary avalanches and wicket flurries, a familiar gremlin kept tugging at the hem of a dominant campaign: The fielding.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Head coach Amol Muzumdar will look at this series where India bossed the big moments but fumbled the basics.
With little at stake in terms of results, India will head into the final match of the series in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday with plenty to fine-tune before bigger challenges loom. The errors on the field were not half-chances or acrobatic near-misses. They were the kind that make coaches wince. In one telling moment in the 4th T20, a mistimed swing ballooned off the stumps and floated gently towards long-on. Smriti Mandhana was perfectly placed. The catch was regulation. And yet, it went down.If that felt like an aberration, Deepti Sharma’s night confirmed it wasn’t. A shin-high full toss on off stump lacked timing, and was hit straight to her at long-on. Deepti went reverse-cupped, and spilled it. Worse still, the ball trickled away for four. What should have been a dot, or a wicket-ending moment, became another footnote of carelessness.
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How concerned are you about the team’s fielding errors during the T20 series against Sri Lanka?
This wasn’t an isolated incident. India dropped five catches in the series opener in Visakhapatnam alone, three of them straightforward. Across the series, the pattern repeated: clean dominance punctured by sloppy fielding.And yet, India’s batting depth and bowling discipline ensured the missed chances did not alter the outcomes. That, perhaps, is the most worrying part. When errors don’t hurt, urgency tends to fade.Wicketkeeper Richa Ghosh was quick to offer perspective. “We had an off day in the field. It’s understandable, but everyone in this team is working really hard on their fielding drills. I won’t say anything about the fielding for this one game,” she said after the 4th T20.One game doesn’t define a team. But a series leaves markers.This Indian side is evolving into a formidable unit. The batting is fearless, the bowling increasingly clinical. Which makes the fielding stand out even more sharply. At the highest level, championships are not won only by sixes and spells; they are secured by catches and sharp ground work.India may have cruised past Sri Lanka in this series, but stronger opponents will not be as forgiving. With the T20 World Cup barely six months away, this is an area India would dearly like to rectify.
