WC victory is special: Mandhana

Mumbai, Nov 6: India vice-captain Smriti Mandhana opened up on her emotions after winning a maiden World Cup trophy and reaching a significant milestone in her career. She said that losing games didn’t make her emotional but instead motivated her to improve, as she knew that a major victory would be the moment when she would get emotional, as had happened after the World Cup win.

The Indian opener also mentioned how the missed opportunities of the team coming close to winning major tournaments but facing heartbreaks in the knockouts left a mark on her heart but at the same time motivated her and the team to work hard and have the ‘Champions’ tag on their chest.

“I have been playing international cricket for over a decade now. We have had 2017 and then 2020, a little bit of heartbreak, and then a lot of semifinal heartbreaks as well, where we thought we could go over the line. Every time that happened, it left a lot of marks within your heart. There is only motivation to get better and try and have ‘champions’ on our chest, but really, really happy and proud of the team. As an athlete, it feels amazing because you play cricket to win the World Cup; you dream about that as a kid. To play in front of 50-plus odd thousand people in your home city and to do it, I am just really proud of the team,” she said in a video shared by the BCCI.

Speaking of showcasing her emotions on the cricket field, Mandhana said, “I don’t have words for them. I think today is the max emotion I have had on the cricket field for sure. I always thought that it is going to happen to me. Whenever we lost a match, I saw a lot of girls crying, but it never really made me emotional because it kind of only motivated me to think, ‘How do I get better’.

“But I knew that winning is going to make me more emotional than losing, so today for sure it felt unreal. And genuinely, I mean, we won everything; it was great, but then looking at the teammates and the way the environment has been in the last 35-40 days, it just made me emotional that for this World Cup for this group of girls, I feel this is the best possible group of humans together – and something of that sort definitely makes me emotional,” she added.