Shafali: ‘I get good sleep’ when India win

Consistency, power-hitting, and confidence. Shafali Verma wants to combine the three things she has learnt at different stages of her career to take India to glory at the T20 World Cup next month.

She always had the power, it was her “natural game”. Consistency is something she has picked up more recently, highlighted by her maiden international century in June this year. And she is hoping to tap into the confidence she gained from leading India to victory in the Under-19 T20 World Cuplast year, where she was also the third-highest scorer.

“I will draw inspiration from the Under-19 World Cup last year,” Shafali told ESPNcricinfo at a QUA brand shoot in Delhi recently. “Of course, it was a massive thing for women’s cricket in India that we won an ICC trophy. It was the biggest moment of my life and I will take confidence from that so that we can lift the T20 World Cup this year as well.

“Our main focus right now is that we win the [World Cup] trophy. Individual goals and records are a part of the game. But there’s no better feeling than your team winning, and those nights I get good sleep.”

Shafali has been part of the India team’s camps at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru in the lead up to the T20 World Cup, which runs from October 3 to 20 in Sharjah and Dubai. She hasn’t played any competitive cricket since the T20 Asia Cup in July, and since she didn’t feature in the Hundred and didn’t put her name in the WBBL draft for the upcoming season, she has been utilising this time to work on herself in different ways.

“I’m not playing the WBBL and the Hundred because I’m working on my fitness and mental levels,” she said. “But even when I played those tournaments, I learnt that fitness is very important because if you want to play long knocks then having good fitness is extremely important.”

One such long knock Shafali played recently was when she scored the double-hundred against South Africa in the home Test in June.

“That day I told myself I had to play a long innings, and not let that opportunity go,” she said. “I don’t know how many bad patches and struggles I went through before that, and such knocks are so rare. But that day everything was going well and my aim was to play for as long as possible.”

Speaking about consistency, she said, “At the start of my career, I just used to go out and hit, but now I’ve made some changes mentally. Now I have the game to block a couple of deliveries as well, I can play along the ground too. You become more consistent once you make mental changes in your game. I’m hoping to carry on this consistency and do well for the team.

“It’s not like if something comes naturally then you don’t have to work hard on it. Just like you work on your weaknesses, you should work on your strengths as well”

Shafali Verma on her power game

“The T20 World Cup in 2020 was my first World Cup and that time I used to go after every ball. Early in your career, such thing may work, but after a point the opposition starts doing video analysis and they can work out your game when it comes to your strengths and weaknesses. I didn’t do that well in the 2023 T20 World Cup either but I learnt a lot from that tournament.

“Now people have started to say my consistency has improved and in the last three-four years I’ve learnt how important being consistent is. I’m just 20 now and plan to get better from the learnings of the last three-four years.”

Shafali’s USP, right from her early days in the Women’s T20 Challenge which led to her India debut at the age of 15 in 2019, has been her power hitting, something she doesn’t want to let go of.

“These kinds of things you learn from an early age and I have worked a lot on it,” she said. “Now it comes very naturally to me. But it’s not like if something comes naturally then you don’t have to work hard on it. Just like you work on your weaknesses, you should work on your strengths as well. So the truth is that I’ve learnt this from childhood and now it comes naturally to me.”