The Garuda Ladies, Indonesia’s national women’s cricket team continues to make rapid strides within the short period since its formation 5 years back. They recently emerged as the 2nd best Asian team in the ASEAN Women’s T20 open tournament held at Bangkok recently.
Persatuan Cricket Indonesia’s (PCI) decision to invest in the development of its national teams by providing them increased exposure in various tournaments is paying off especially for the Garuda Ladies as they got another chance to learn from some of the more experienced teams such as Thailand, who represented Asia in the World cup qualifiers and Tanzania a strong team in the African region. Teams from Malaysia, Hong Kong & Bhutan were the other teams in the 6-country tournament.
Indonesia took on the strong Hong Kong team in their first game of the tournament and the talismanic Andriani was the star of the game for the Garudas as she dominated with both the bat and the ball. Hong Kong batted first and were in the process of building a strong total when Andriani struck to remove the dangerous Daswani. She followed up with 3 more wickets for just 5 runs and with the help of Vegy Januarika & Edenyce Eduard restricted Hong Kong to 67 runs.
Chasing 68 to win, the Garudas were in early trouble, but Andriani, stood up once again and this time with the bat, guided the team towards safety and Indonesia eventually won by 2 wickets despite a scary collapse towards the end.
In the second game, the Garuda Ladies were in top bowling form as Andriani, Vegy Januarika & Wayan Sariani combined beautifully to bowl out Bhutan for just 48 runs. Chasing low totals are always tricky and it needed the calmness of Tantri Wigradianti & Sariani lower down the order to see Indonesia home with 4 wickets in hand.
The Garuda Ladies were up against Tanzania & Thailand in the next 2 games and in both the games the lack of experience did show up as Indonesia was comfortably routed by 2 much stronger teams and in both cases, the batting needing to show more fight.
Indonesia took on familiar rivals Malaysia in the last game of the tournament and prevailed by just 1 wicket in a humdinger of a game. It was a collective bowling effort that saw Malaysia being restricted to 65 in their 20 overs. The Garudas top order didn’t click once again but the captain Puji Haryanti & Andriani rebuilt the innings. Things started looking very bleak for the Garudas when they needed 20 more to win with just 2 wickets in hand but a superb partnership anchored by Annisa Sulistianingsih ensured that Indonesia scraped to a 1 wicket win in the 20th over.
We are very happy with the way the team performed in this tournament, said Abhiram Singh Yadav, the Vice Chairman of Persatuan Cricket Indonesia. The bowlers were very good throughout the tournament with Andriani eventually taking home the Best Bowler of the Tournament award.
