Pooja Vastrakar - the gamechanger of Shahdol

"The focus was to get the team towards 200, planned my batting with that in mind. I love batting under pressure. In domestic cricket, coaches always send me out to bat when the team is under pressure," Pooja Vastrakar stated while receiving the Player of the Match award for 59-ball 67, which bailed India out of a precarious situation and laid the platform for their 107-run win in the 2022 world cup opener against Pakistan.

Pooja's batting might not come as a surprise, particularly when she broke free against the Pakistani spinners, who had triggered India's middle-order collapse, reducing them to 114 for 6. But her methods remain firmly her own. She neither fully applied the inputs of the outgoing batters nor heeded the team's conservative target of 200, which they eventually crossed with almost five more overs to play. Again, it wouldn't surprise that when she's out batting, Pooja prefers to stay in her own bubble and bat the way she can.

Take the case of a domestic game last February when she was opening the batting for Shahdol in the JS Anand Trophy - a 50-over inter-divisional tournament. While she sent the record-keepers scurrying to find out if world records were being broken with her run of scores - a century sandwiched between scores of 262, 219 within a week, she was blissfully unaware of what she was up to.

With no scorecard on display at the SS Commune Ground in Indore where she was plundering the runs, she said after the first of the three centuries, "I thought I had batted well and possibly scored 120-150 odd runs. When I came back to the pavilion, I was told the score was 260-something. I thought that was possibly the team score. How was I to know that I had scored so many? I don't like to keep a count of my runs and I had never even seen any player score 200 in women's cricket all my playing career," Pooja recalls in a chat with Cricbuzz.

Pooja's first player of the match award in International cricket offered glimpses of her batting potential that was seen only in sparks thus far at the highest level. The inconsistency, coupled with a series of injuries, has plagued her career progress which had started off on a high note with a half-century in her second ODI, against Australia in 2018. But the performance against Pakistan in India's World Cup opener, even though viewed in the early hours of Sunday on Indian television, stands to run far deeper in the hinterlands of Madhya Pradesh, much like her young career so far has.

Only 22 years old, Vastrakar has played a significant role in helping change the face of women's cricket in the tribal district of Shahdol, which is one of the poorest regions in the country. In 2006, Shahdol was named as one of the 250 most backward districts of India by the government and still continues to receive grants from the Backward Regions Grant Fund Programme. Even today, more than 60 percent of Shahdol's population lives below the poverty line, which is less than INR 36 (USD 0.5) per day. Vastrakar though, brought up in the BSNL Colony (residential quarters for employees of a government-run telecom company) lived a life cocooned from those pains.

Her interest in cricket too developed inside her residential complex, watching the older boys play tennis-ball matches for money. "Those games were a lot of fun. And there, even the spectators were offered poha-jalebi and samosa. So I used to look forward to those games."

On TV, Virender Sehwag's batting mesmerised her, and she was convinced that becoming a cricketer was a gateway to a better life. So she convinced her elder sister, who was a national-level sprinter, to help her find a pathway to reach the national team. "I was a good gully cricketer, so I urged my sister to help me get into an academy. She went around the town to find one, but came back to say that none of them trained girls. So I left thinking about it."

By 2010, too many broken window panes in the BSNL colony had forced the kids to step outside and play cricket. They used the ground facilities of one of the cricket academies nearby, which remained unused in the mornings. "We used to play 4-over games. As luck would have it, on one of the days when it was my turn to bat, I hit a few sixes, one guy spotted me. He came and asked me if I was interested to join the academy and took me to Ashutosh Shrivastav, who has been my coach since then."

With only one other woman cricketer in the Rewa division, most of her practice took place with the boys. That Vastrakar had pace in her bowling, power in her hits and a rocket-arm beyond girls of her age wasn't too hard to spot even when she was a 10-year-old. As a result, her graduation through the system from thereon was swift. By 13, she was playing for the state under-19 side, and in less than a year, she was drafted in Madhya Pradesh's senior team.

"My father also enjoyed playing sports but had to give it up in order to concentrate on academics. So he wanted his kids to live the life that he couldn't. So, more than the marks we scored, he was happier reading about our achievements in the newspaper. It worked out perfectly for me since I too desperately wanted to escape studies. Once I joined the state team, I would even lie to my father and tell him I need to spend more time on my fitness, which was an excuse to miss classes. Thankfully, my school principal gave me permission to skip classes."

In three years, Vastrakar's ability to bowl bouncers at a sharp pace, apart from her skillsets in other departments, had helped her reach the fringes of the national team. At 18 she made her international debut, and only in her second innings cracked a half-century against a full-strength Australian bowling attack - a world record for a No. 9 batter. But it wasn't just her batting that stole the limelight. In the same match, Alex Blackwell noted that "her bouncer is not a bad option to test Meg Lanning early."

Touring different parts of the country also opened her up to newer life experiences, and her success had a direct impact on perceptions around young girls pursuing sports. "In Shahdol, when I was growing up, people were extremely narrow-minded when it came to women playing sports. Woh samajhte the ki betiyan kuch nahi kar sakte (they believed that girls weren't capable of achieving professional success). Near my house, there was a girl who enjoyed playing basketball but her father wouldn't allow her to go on tours. But it has changed now. Parents are coming home with their daughters and telling us that they want them to play sports. In fact, now some of them even come with their 5-year-old daughters and I have to discourage them from sending girls so young to training academies."

Not surprisingly, personal milestones don't matter much. "In 2015 when I had joined the Shahdol team, we didn't have enough girls to play cricket," Vastrakar recalls. "We would select a few kabaddi players, a few players from other sports and form a team. We would lose by big margins in these inter-divisional tournaments. However, since I was selected to play for India in 2018 and there were banners across the district with my face on it, today we have 30-40 women players to choose from. Times have changed. Today, we are beating the other teams by margins of 300 runs. It feels good."

Vastrakar may soon not remember her own score against Pakistan, but such is the nature of the sporting rivalry, that it will remain etched in the collective memory of those who were a part of it - as players and spectators. And in Shahdol, a few years later, it will be worth finding out how many more girls stepped out to play the sport because they witnessed Pooja's heroics at the world cup.