Smriti Mandhana has been named Wisden’s Leading Cricketer in the World (Women) for 2024. Annesha Ghosh’s piece on Mandhana originally appeared in the 2025 edition of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack.
Here she was, pairing promise with performance, drubbing demons she’s long gripped and grappled with, one run at a time. By the close of 2024, India’s Smriti Mandhana had racked up 1,659 – the most by a woman in an international year. If her four ODI hundreds, another record, marked the burial of a penchant for squandering starts, her chart-topping 763 T20I runs, plus 747 in ODIs, were full of adaptability. Her masterly manoeuvring between formats peaked mid-year against South Africa: 117, 136 and 90 in successive ODIs (343 is the most in a three-match series), a career-best 149 in the one-off Test, and 100 T20s runs for once out.
“Scoring five international centuries was mostly down to not thinking much about scoring centuries,” says Mandhana. “All these years, I had been overcomplicating things with questions like: ‘Why am I getting out in the seventies and eighties?’ Clearing my mind helped, big time. I reinjected into my muscle memory the habit of batting long – which I did routinely as an Under-19 cricketer. The batting camp before the South Africa series allowed me to curb my T20-esque urge of shot-making in the longer formats.”
In all, Mandhana scored nearly a quarter of her team’s 6,739 runs – all the more impressive given that her opening partner changed seven times. Another measure of India’s overdependence on her came during the T20 World Cup, where a rare patchy run coincided with the team’s group-stage exit. In the end, the only trophy Mandhana had to show for all her runs was the WPL with Royal Challengers Bengaluru, whom she captained.
As the year neared its end, she powered ODI hundreds against New Zealand in Ahmedabad, and Australia in Perth. More sure-footed than ever, she married her trademark off-side prowess with new-found ingenuity, reaffirming her standing as one of the most evolved of batters.
“The New Zealand ton matured me beyond imagination,” she says. “After single-digit scores in the World Cup, and net sessions where I was edging everything, I resisted the cover-drive, my bread-and-butter shot, through the first ten overs. My best knock of 2024 taught me the most about discipline.”
For a cricketer whose talent is widely assumed to have helped her achieve all she has in an 11-year international career, Mandhana, at 28, has proven a mother of reinvention. And if her growing self-awareness is any indication, she may just be getting started.
