Smriti Mandhana

Smriti Mandhana bats with the grace typical of left-handers, with elegance and impeccable timing, but the addition of power to her game has made her one of the most potent batters in women's cricket.

Mandhana made her senior-team debut for her home state, Maharashtra, as a prodigious 13-year-old, and was captaining the side by 16. She earned her first senior international cap in 2013, in a T20I against Bangladesh. Her ODI debut followed five days later. She made her Test debut the next year, against England in Wormsley, and scored a maiden fifty in the game.

Over the next decade, Mandhana established herself among the most prolific batters in women's cricket, breaking into the top five run-scorers in ODIs and surpassing several records along the way. She was the first India women's player to score hundreds in all three international formats, and in 2025, she hit a 50-ball hundred against England in the ODI World Cup, the second fastest by balls faced in all women's cricket at the time.

It marked a remarkable purple patch for Mandhana. In 2024, she amassed 1659 runs, breaking a 28-year record set by Belinda Clark, for the most international runs in a calendar year. The following year, she became the first woman to score over a thousand runs in ODIs in a calendar year, 434 of those coming in India's World Cup-winning campaign, in which she was the second-highest run-scorer. She also broke her own record for the most ODI hundreds in a year, topping her four from 2024 with five in 2025, the joint most alongside Tazmin Brits.

Mandhana made appearances in several franchise leagues, including the BBL and the Hundred, but she wrote herself into the history books at home, captaining Royal Challengers Bengaluru women to their first-ever title - men's or women's - in the 2024 WPL.