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Hello, I'm Alison Mitchell
and welcome to Stumped.
With me for the ABC in Perth
is Clint Wheeldon.
And Sunil Gupta is with us
for Akashvani in Delhi.
Now is Smriti Mandhana
the greatest batter
that the women's game has ever seen?
She was only on Stumped speaking
to us a few weeks ago,
and she's now the all-time leading run
scorer in women's international cricket.
Her 124 from 64 balls in India's win
over Hong Kong in the Asia Cup
took her past fellow Indian Mithali
Raj, whose record stood at 10,868.
To add to that,
Mandhana's century was her 18th
in all formats, taking her
past former Australia captain
Meg Lanning's record for the most
in women's internationals.
Now, Sunil, two more records for
Mandhana and listeners can go back
and listen to her
and her reflections
on what was a disappointing
T20 World Cup for Team India.
But individually,
what makes her such a special player?
She has the natural gift of timing.
It's something like Rohit Sharma has.
I mean, she hits the ball
so effortlessly.
She's not very big built,
not muscular.
When she steps out and lofts the ball
or she cuts or she pulls
or she swivels and flicks,
she does it with such poise
and the ball just sails everywhere.
I love watching her
because she's so easy on the eye
and she doesn't take any pressure.
You can see it in her face.
She is calm and she is cool and
she is always there in the moment.
Yeah, everybody
plays a rash stroke now and then,
but she is, to my mind,
one of the loveliest cricketers
on the ground
that you can ever watch.
Especially in the batting department.
She is fantastic.
Very elegant to watch. In particular,
I love the cover drives.
But is she now the greatest batter
in women's cricket?
That's a word
I don't particularly like.
I don't warm to the word 'greatest'.
It's it's too sort of, you know,
finite. That's it.
Nobody else. Never before.
Never again.
Not greatest. Certainly you've got
to look at the eras.
The eras are completely different.
How can you compare Sir Donald
Bradman with, say, somebody today?
You can't.
Everything was different.
So I think you need to look at eras
and within the eras,
is she one of the best?
Definitely. Greatest?
No, I would not say greatest because there is no
word called greatest, certainly to my mind in sport.
I mean words like GOAT that you keep
hearing in cricket, you know,
[Novak] Djokovic and so on and so forth.
No. Ali, you can't compare
what's going on today
to what it was 50 years ago.
You can't do that.
But is she one of the best cricketers
certainly of her generation?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
There are others also.
You've got people like Beth Mooney,
you've got Laura Wolvaardt,
you've got Phoebe Litchfield,
you've got Ash Gardner.
And all of them are in the running,
in the batting stakes.
They're not bowlers..
well some of them are.
Of course, Ellyse Perry is a bowler
and we know that others bowl as well.
So she [Mandhana] doesn't.
So we're really talking about her
as a batter. As a batter,
she is sometimes incomparable.
Really, to my mind. Yes.
So Clint, let's let's bring in the
Australian perspective
because if we are, I mean, we're not going to...
let's not label this then 'greatest' per se to appease Sunil.
No let's label it, Ali!
This is
the great pub discussion.
I get what Sunil's saying.
He's quite right. But that takes
all the fun out of this debate.
If we're not going to go and try to
find who you think is the greatest,
these are the discussions
that you have at the bar
with all your friends
about who is the greatest,
and that's what makes them fiery
and interesting.
So on that point, while you cannot
argue in terms of runs, not at all,
but I'm still going to put
Meg Lanning, 'The Megastar', in front.
And this is my reasoning why.
Part of seven World Cups. Seven
winning World Cup campaigns
elevates Lanning overall to me,
and I'm just going to ignore what Sunil
said about not being able to compare
and contrast because I agree
with what you're saying,
but that takes all the joy.
There's always caveats, aren't there?
Absolutely. But see 145 matches
across the formats for Lanning.
Smriti's played more games
and that obviously helps.
She's played more Tests and
also got to beat up on with respect
the South Africans when she played
them, which Lanning didn't get to do
on the two occasions that they
were supposed to play South Africa.
I just think, although
these are individual statistics
and we're talking
about an individual as a batter,
I do think that you have to also look
at the success that you help bring
your team and your ability to deliver
in those massive moments.
So I'm going to put Meg Lanning
just in front,
and I'm also going
to throw this caveat in there
that Meg's got a tunnel
boring machine named after her,
and she'd be the only cricketer
that I can think of.
So building all the tunnels
for all the roads
underneath Melbourne
that's still currently going on.
Meg Lanning, one of those machines,
is named after her,
so if nothing else,
that puts her into elite company.
Well it does. Mithali Raj, Sunil; I know
you don't want to make comparisons,
but I'm going to, you know,
force you into something here.
Smriti Mandhana was named
in Time Magazine,
wasn't she, as one of the most
influential sports people of her time?
And actually only Temba Bavuma was the
only other cricketer who made that list.
So when you talk about sort of
greatness, there's lots of ingredients,
aren't there,
that can go into an overall label?
Absolutely, absolutely.
I loved what Clint said,
and I bow humbly to him about the fun
of comparing and contrasting.
Absolutely.
But again, if you talk
about Mithali Raj, there are
so many points of difference.
You know the era once again all
that, right.
She was breaking barriers,
you could argue, in her era.
She was an anchor.
She's laid the platform for Smriti.
Yeah. No absolutely.
To my mind
Mithali Raj laid the platform exactly
right for Indian women's cricket.
She showed what could be done at a time
when there was very little support.
There were very little people
behind them.
There was very little money
in the game.
Very few opportunities.
So many things are different today.
Today, Mandhana is an ad star.
She is there in the ads.
When you get onto the TV ads in India,
you are somebody, let me tell you.
No question about it.
So I would like to compare,
but I would like to say both of them
in their own way,
in their own time,
what they have brought to the game.
And I hope
that Mandhana continues later on
after she retires at some point
of time to contribute to the game.
I think they are,
both of them, have added tremendously.
Not just to the Indian women's game,
but the international women's game.
Everybody knows Mithali Raj,
everybody respects her.
And as you said, if she's in
Time Magazine, Smriti Mandhana, then
you can well understand what level she's
reached in an American publication.
I wouldn't like to compare, but I would
like to say that there are two leaves
on different stages of the tree.
The great tree.
She was slightly earlier.
This one has come slightly later.
Mithali Raj,
you know, was India captain.
So made a lot of those runs with
with that added responsibility.
Meg Lanning, Australian captain...
For 18 years.
Extraordinary. And then I could add, you can throw
Charlotte Edwards into the conversation
because she was also right up there
in terms of the run scoring,
the captaincy. She took England to World
Cup wins - a double in 2009, no less.
I remember watching Charlotte here
at the WACA and
this is goodness me,
nearly two decades ago,
and she was so far ahead of the rest
of the players out there on the field.
She was just majestic to watch. Her
ability to be able to find the boundary.
We talk about a glorious cover drive
and just her courage as well
with what she was able to do.
She was magnificent.
And there's probably, you know, there
are undoubtedly, of course, players
you could go back deeper
in the day who
in their era were the greatest
of their time.
I mean, when you go right back to
sort of the very start and the very
early eras of women's cricket, which
we're not going to do in this moment,
but Smriti Mandhana is up there,
probably the the greatest
in the current era, isn't she?
And I'll tell you, she replaces Mithali
Raj in the Guinness Book of Records
for most runs scored in an
international career (female).
That's how it is listed
alongside records for,
and I love this when I looked it up;
The highest altitude cricket match
and a particular favorite of mine,
the Guinness record
for the largest cricket jersey,
and Sunil you'll be proud to know that
that record is held by the Narendra Modi Stadium in 2022,
because they wanted to mark 15 years of
the IPL. I was just imagining this
is the largest cricket jersey ever
that anyone was going to wear,
but it was,
in fact, a jersey that got spread
across the entire outfield
of the Narendra Modi Stadium.
So it measured 66m long by 42m wide.
So there you go, Sunil.
More more cricketing pride for India.
It's a large stadium. I can tell you
it is a very large stadium.
I've been there and I've seen it.
Yes. And when it's full and it
has been full, India versus Pakistan
in the World Cup, my goodness me.
Really, you could be in the middle
of, you know, not a jungle,
but you could be
in the middle of a forest of
just blue, blue, blue, blue, blue.
It's astonishing.
Record breaking in every sense.
Well, that's it for Stumped
for this week. Give us a like
and subscribe to the YouTube channel
so that you never miss a thing.
My thanks to Sunil Gupta and
to Clint Wheeldon and to all of you.
We'll see you again
next time. Bye bye.
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