Women’s Cricket Headed For Stratosphere In India After Long-awaited First World Cup Victory

Skipper Harmanpreet Kaur’s trophy-winning catch on Sunday ended India’s decades-long wait for Women’s Cricket World Cup glory. This may also have changed the face of women’s cricket.

India has long been a global power in men’s football but had to wait for the women to finally become world champions. And it wasn’t for lack of trying.

India hosted the World Cup for the first time in 1978 and finished fourth out of four teams. It hosted again in 1997 and reached its first semi-final, losing the final to Australia in 2005 and England in 2017.

Kaur was in the 2017 squad and her 171 not out (from 115 balls) against reigning champions Australia – the fourth-highest score in the Women’s World Cup – made the cricket world take greater notice of India. Being defeated by England in the final by only nine points increased the country’s desire to take the final step.

“Every time we lost, we would return home heartbroken and stay silent for a few days,” Kaur said on Sunday. “When we came back, we said we had to start from ball one again. It was heartbreaking because we played so many World Cups, reaching finals, semi-finals and sometimes not getting that far. We were always thinking, when are we going to break this?”

Now the new question is: Where to from here?

“Women’s football was already on the rise in India,” said Nasser Hussain, former England men’s captain and commentator. “They needed this title to put a seal on it, and it should take the game into the stratosphere here.”

The victory came after a concerted effort to overcome the hump in India. In the last World Cup in 2022, India failed to even make it out of the group stage; It was a debacle that unsettled officials at home and led to increased urgency to strengthen the women’s game.

The Women’s Premier League, an idea that has long seemed like a pipe dream, was launched the next year. Three seasons later, the best players to emerge from the Twenty20 league were key to India’s victory. Medium pacer Kranti Goud (nine wickets in eight matches) and left-arm spinner Shree Charani (14 wickets in nine matches) made their international debuts in early 2025.

This may just be the beginning. Indian men’s great Sachin Tendulkar compared the joy of Sunday’s win to the World Cup, which India won for the first time in the men’s category in 1983.

Tendulkar wrote to

India’s reigning champions paid tribute to the women who paved the way for them.

The women collected the winners’ medals on Sunday night and posed for official team photographs well after midnight local time and handed the trophy to the former India players in attendance. Among them was Jhulan Goswami, who took 43 wickets in five World Cups and was part of the team that lost the 2017 final.

Goswami was confident that the wait for the next trophy would be much shorter.

“This confidence and mindset to improve individually as players will make them stronger as a team,” Goswami said. “This will set a benchmark for future Indian teams to come back even in difficult situations because they know how to do it.”