On being agentic

Jemimah Rodrigues and the art of not letting go

Jemimah Rodrigues was dropped. Today she dropped Australia.

Birmingham 2022, Cape Town 2023, Sharjah 2024, Perth 2024, Delhi 2025. For those who had witnessed India unraveling in big chases against Australia time and again, to not believe tonight was a coping mechanism. Even when the equation dropped down to 40 off 33, the mind could not help but flit back to that fateful evening in Birmingham when Rodrigues and Harmanpreet could not get the job done with 44 needed off 30. Like a tired lover witnessing her beloved’s changed ways, to feign pessimism was a way of protecting oneself.

Only that is a luxury elite athletes do not possess. To believe is in the bloodstream of top athletes because variance is king in sport. Sure, probability distributions are grounded in epistemic truth, but sport is an artificially complex domain which lives on the tails of the distribution. By failing to trust that the impossible is possible, one cordons oneself off to unlikely outcomes because without agency the expected outcome prevails. Belief butters the elite cricketer’s bread. Faith bordering on delusion is both a necessity and defiance.

At several points during today’s knock of 127*, Rodrigues must have wanted to let go. After passing the three-figure mark, it must have been natural for her to want to take a moment to herself to hit reset. She had just passed her maiden World Cup century in front of her home crowd after all. Lest she begin to scold herself for her perceived selfishness, it is standard advice to spend time at the non-strikers’ end after having passed your century. But Rodrigues cannot do that because at the other end is a young Richa Ghosh who must be handheld through this tense phase. She must not just run both their runs, but also keep her combative partner grounded in the fact that ones and twos are enough to notch up this historic win.

The best she can afford to do is kneel down on the pitch and curtain herself off from the outside world with her bare arms. She does so. A second later, it’s time to go again.

What a world she carved out for herself when she got going. Together with Harmanpreet, she made sure that India nullified the advantage that the obscenely talented Phoebe Litchfield’s natural left-handedness gave Australia. If Litchfield was able to score a historically high percentage of her runs through the offside, Rodrigues, who today struck 58% of her runs through off, replicated that by moving around the crease against a high percentage of her deliveries. A marker of how innovatively she batted is that she struck more runs through the offside when the ball was pitched on her middle stump than she did when it was pitched on off.

It is impossible that the emotions weren’t there but, unlike modern therapy culture will tell us, some situations demand compartmentalization and Rodrigues did just that. To feel is essential, but when there is little to be gained from listening to your emotions, to feel is to be at life’s mercy. It is the opposite of being agentic. Rodrigues’ challenge tonight was to tuck the emotions away, and she did it so well that once the gates opened, they simply could not be shut.

It must have felt cathartic because you could tell nobody was as hurt as Rodrigues by India’s habitual collapses in big chases. After Birmingham 2022, she could barely lift her head up to face the world. Nobody has been more publicly apologetic about India’s shoddy fielding displays, to the point where you just wanted to put an arm around her shoulder and whisper in her ears that it was okay.

Today, when Derby 2017 was beginning to seem less like legacy and more like a distant memory, Rodrigues provided a new generation of cricket fans, who are here because of Harmanpreet’s 171 but probably never had the fortune of witnessing it unfold, with their own little version of women’s cricket’s inflexion point. It took a player who has been treated by her team as replaceable to show India the cleansing truth that they didn’t need to play the perfect game to beat Australia.

There are several ways of interpreting the stray sentence which kickstarts this article. It could be a reference to the axing she endured from the Indian ODI side prior to the 2022 World Cup. It could be a callback to the more recent incident when she became the scapegoat after India’s self-destructive ways. It could be a nod to the reprieves she enjoyed from the Australian fielders. Over the years, no matter what challenge life has thrown at her, Rodrigues has taken it on with a smile and an unquestioning commitment to her duties. Captain the side when the frontline leader is resting? No problem. Open the batting when an experienced pro has been benched? Happily. Slot down to No. 5 because the middle-order lacks experience? I’ll reinvent myself. She is India’s ultimate shape-shifter not because she can, but because she believes in being agentic. She kept getting punched, so she punched back hard enough to put India in a World Cup final.

Jemimah Rodrigues was dropped. Today she dropped Australia.