Ahead of the U-19 Women's T20 World Cup beginning on January 14 in South Africa, the Indian contingent is already in the rainbow nation to gear up for the marquee event. The Women in Blue are competing in a five-match T20I series against the hosts, the first of which they won comfortably by 54 runs in Pretoria on Tuesday.
Although it was Shweta Sehrawat (40) and Soumya Tiwari (40) who scored the crucial runs for the team after being asked to bat first and Shabnam MD and Archana Devi who scalped 6 wickets between them to put the opposition on the backfoot, it is Mannat Kashyap who has grabbed the headlines as she ran out the non-striker batter for leaving the crease before she had released the ball in her delivery stride.
Notably, Mannat 'mankad' the South African batter Jenna Evans in the 17th over of the run chase when the latter had left her crease even before the ball was bowled. Showing great presence of mind and the awareness of the fact that the batter was trying to steal a run, the Indian cricketer smartly dislodged the bails to catch her short of her ground.
Check out the video of the run out here:
Despite the dismissal being a legal mode of getting out as per the laws of the game, there have been debates around the "spirit of the game" associated with this kind of run out. Even though the Indians earned that wicket, Team India withdrew their appeal. However, Evans couldn't take much advantage of that chance and was eventually dismissed by Archana who caught her off her own bowling. She could only make 7 runs off 12 balls.
It is worth highlighting that Mannat had earlier tried to run out New Zealand Development's Izzy Gaze in a similar manner but on that occasion the batter had survived, managing to get back inside the line in time.