Punam Raut

Some batters set the tempo of a game by hitting out, and others by simply refusing to leave. Punam Raut belonged to the second group. For years she opened for India with a calm, upright style, wearing down bowling attacks while the stroke-makers around her took the headlines.  She grew up in a Mumbai chawl in Prabhadevi, where her father, a car driver, stretched his means to buy her a kit and enrol her at the Shivseva Sports Club.

Raut made her India debut at the 2009 World Cup, and from 2010 she was a regular, steady rather than spectacular. In August 2014 she made her Test debut at Wormsley, and a few months later she scored 130 against South Africa. After February 2016, she did not play for India for more than a year. She used the time to rework her technique and made two centuries in the senior zonal tournament, which brought her back for a quadrangular series in South Africa.

In May 2017, against Ireland at Potchefstroom, she and Deepti Sharma put on 320 runs for the first wicket, a world record for an opening stand in women's ODIs. Raut finished on 109 not out, which was the first of her three ODI hundreds. The 2017 World Cup in England was her finest series. She made 86 against England in the opening game, then 106 against Australia, her first World Cup century, and she was among India's best batters as the team reached the final at Lord's. Critics pointed out that her strike rate was low, and as the game grew faster, her classical approach looked old-fashioned to some.

In March 2021, she was one of the stars of the home series against South Africa, scoring an unbeaten 104 in one of the ODIs. Soon afterwards, the selectors left her out, and she missed the 2022 World Cup squad, which she called disappointing given how well she had played. She could not win her place back for a long time, as competition for spots in the squad grew and India found younger options at the top of the order.