Harmanpreet Kaur of India looks on following the 3rd T20I against England. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

India lost to England by six wickets in the third and final match of the women’s T20I series, thereby conceding a 1-2 series defeat to the English ahead of the T20 World Cup.

With little over a week left for the tournament, also set to be held in England, here are three takeaways from how the India squad performed, and the areas which the Women in Blue might need to rectify before the T20 showpiece.

Yastika, Harmanpreet, and dot balls

Yastika Bhatia has had quite the comeback into the Indian team after a string of injuries which kept her sidelined. She’s the series’ highest scorer with 119 runs at a strike rate of 126.59. However, while her ability to find the boundary has been impressive, England was able to slow her down through dot balls, and she ended the series with a dot ball percentage of 46.8.

This one of the reasons why she was even retired out during the 2nd T20I when she was on 33 off 36 balls. India captain Harmanpreet Kaur also pointed to the amount of dot balls her side played, which contributed to the loss in that match. “I think we put pressure on ourselves. When we were getting runs, we should have kept rotating the strike. We played a lot of dot balls in between and that put us under pressure.”

The Women in Blue often find themselves stagnate in the middle overs. The India captain, herself, finds herself embroiled in the strike rate issue. In this series, she’s taken some time to get going, with her run rate after first 10 balls being less than 100 (90.90). Moreover, her coming out to bat at No. 5 in the third match didn’t help the team’s cause — even though she managed to accelerate later to score a measured 40-ball 56, which brings us to India’s middle order.

Middle order malaise

India has swapped around its order of batters through the middle through this series, and barring the third match, the returns from 4 to 7 have been fairly average.

For instance, Jemimah Rodrigues has historically thrived at No. 3. It is the position in which she has scored close to three-quarters of her T20 runs, and is where she bats for her WPL franchise, Delhi Capitals. In this series, though, she has batted at four and five, and though she performed fairly well, both are positions she lacks experience in. Jemimah is especially important because she is the batter best suited to providing an attacking impetus from the get-go and sustaining a quicker rate of scoring.

However, India will now have to account for Yastika, who has come out to bat at No. 3 in all three matches in the England series. Seeing the amount of balls she might need to settle, it might be futile to bring the wicketkeeper-batter any further down.

Similarly, Harmanpreet, who has traditionally batted at four in this side, walked out at five in the final match of series. While she got a flurry of boundaries away at the end of the innings, her careful starts combined with Yastika’s own propensity for playing dot balls means that India is vulnerable to periods of stagnation through the middle.

Combined with the lack of runs from the openers and Richa Ghosh down the order, It becomes imperative for India to quickly land upon a combination that gets the best out of its middle-order batters, and allows them to be an effective engine room for this team.

Bowling attack yet to be perfected

India came into this series with a host of bowling options but questions around how it would structure its attack. Across the three matches, Kranti Gaud, Arundhati Reddy, Nandni Sharma, Deepti Sharma, N. Shree Charani and Shreyanka Patil all received outings, but India walks away with few questions answered about what its strongest attack is.

Most concerningly, it has once again struggled to respond when put under pressure, a trend that has continued from its series defeat away in South Africa. When England batters (most prominently Alice Capsey and Heather Knight in the series decider) made a concerted effort to proactively take the attack to the bowlers, they had little response.

With Renuka Thakur and Radha Yadav not getting a match in the series, it seems likely that two of Kranti, Arundhati, and Nandni will take up the seamer roles along with Deepti and Shree Charani, while the final decision could be between Shreyanka and a third seamer.

With an unforgiving T20 World Cup group stage to come soon, India must soon work out what the optimal balance for its attack will be.

Published on Jun 03, 2026