WACA After Dark: How an Indian Chase Became a Global Mood Ring

Australia 282-8, India 283-5 – the scorecard reads like an accountant’s ledger that accidentally got possessed by Bollywood. In the end the Women in Blue chased down the highest target in their history, and an entire planet of insomniacs from Perth to Patiala updated their group-chat status with the same three-word eulogy: “Well, that happened.”

For the uninitiated, the fixture was merely the third ODI of a five-match rubber nobody scheduled for the evening news bulletins of Europe or the breakfast scrolls of North America. Yet by the time Jemimah Rodrigues upper-cut Megan Schutt into the Fremantle night sky, the game had become a referendum on everything from gender equity to the global supply chain of raw sporting emotion. Sky Sports UK broke into rolling stock-market coverage—cricket being, after all, the only futures market where short positions are taken on short midwickets. Meanwhile, in the United Arab Emirates, expatriate Indians celebrated by setting off fireworks so exuberant that oil traders briefly mistook them for a refinery mishap and nudged Brent crude up 0.3 percent.

The match itself was a masterclass in the absurdities of the human condition. Australia—defending champions, owners of more silverware than a Bond villain’s sideboard—posted what statisticians call a “paralytic total” on the WACA’s drop-in trampoline. Beth Mooney compiled 72 while simultaneously negotiating a sponsorship clause requiring her to mention a breakfast cereal that tastes like sweetened cardboard. Tahlia McGrath struck 47 at a strike rate that would make venture capitalists blush, only to be undone by her own captain’s decision to promote Alana King—leg-spinner, part-time pinch-hitter, full-time chaos agent—ahead of herself. King responded by mistiming a slog so badly the ball required a visa to mid-off. The innings closed with Australia eight down and the air thick enough with tension to bottle and sell as artisanal anxiety.

Enter India. Or more precisely, enter Smriti Mandhana, whose cover drive is rumored to be under investigation by the UN for crimes against geometry. Mandhana’s 90 came embellished with thirteen boundaries, one existential crisis for the point fielder, and a running subplot involving a spider-cam that seemed magnetically attracted to her helmet. When she departed—caught by King at deep cover, proving that karma has a sense of humor—Richa Ghosh walked in swinging like a hedge-fund manager in a bear market. Together with Rodrigues she added 66 in 6.3 overs, a passage of play that caused the ICC’s algorithm to file a workplace grievance.

The denouement arrived with the inevitability of a tax deadline. India needed two off three balls; Rodrigues carved a length ball past backward point, the boundary rope retreated in surrender, and 1.4 billion WhatsApp messages were instantly forwarded with the caption “Mauka Mauka, the Reckoning.” Fireworks lit up Mumbai’s skyline, which in 2024 is mostly scaffolding and regret. In Melbourne, Australian fans consoled themselves with the thought that at least their cricket board still pays its intern on time.

So what does it all mean, globally speaking? For starters, the result tilts the Women’s Championship points table like a seesaw manned by drunken economists. More importantly, it nudges the Overton Window on what women’s sport can demand in broadcast rights—Foxtel executives were seen Googling “scalable revenue optimism” while pretending their coffee was still hot. In a week when half the Northern Hemisphere is arguing about which septuagenarian gets the nuclear codes, here was a contest decided by nerve, nuance, and the precise curvature of a 22-yard strip of clay. If that isn’t a metaphor for something, the metaphors union would like a word.

We leave Perth with Australia pondering why its death bowling now resembles a retirement village at closing time, and India flying east carrying the sort of momentum physicists call relativistic. Somewhere in the cosmos, an alien civilization tuning into the cosmic background radiation will pick up the faint echo of Ravi Shastri yelling “Tracer bullet!” and conclude that Earth, for all its flaws, still knows how to throw a decent party.