Smriti Mandhana walked out to bat against Hong Kong in Dubai on 4 September 2026 needing a little over a hundred runs to become the highest run-scorer, man or woman, that Indian cricket has ever produced in international cricket. She got there with a six, then kept going, finishing on 124 off 64 balls with seven sixes, three of them in a row late in the innings. India won by 137 runs and reached the final of the Women’s Asia Cup. Mandhana had also gone past Meg Lanning’s tally of international centuries and, for good measure, hit more sixes in Women’s T20Is than any other Indian.
“Yeah, till I was batting, I didn’t know what record I had broken, because I didn’t know the exact runs,” she said afterwards. It is a fairly typical response from a batter who has spent the past decade collecting landmarks while insisting, in interview after interview, that the runs matter mostly because of what they do for the team.
From Sangli to the India dressing room
Mandhana was born on 18 July 1996 in Mumbai and grew up in Sangli, Maharashtra, where her father and brother both played club cricket. She came through the Maharashtra state set-up as a left-handed opener with an unusually clean bat swing for a junior player, and by 17 she had already made history: a double century in a List A match in October 2013, the first by an Indian woman.
India picked her up soon after. She made her ODI and T20I debuts in the same series, against Bangladesh in April 2013, and added a Test cap in August 2014 against England. Two years later she was named ICC Women’s Emerging Cricketer of the Year, and the rest of her twenties turned into a fairly steady accumulation of runs, records and, eventually, captaincy.
A batting method that travels
What has kept Mandhana at the top for over a decade is that her batting works almost everywhere. She drives through the covers as well in Taunton as she pulls through midwicket in Mumbai, and she has scored heavily in England, Australia and South Africa as well as at home, which is not something every Indian batter, male or female, can claim. India men’s batter Shubman Gill once described her strokeplay as having “that slow, lazy elegance like Damien Martyn,” a comparison that captures why bowling coaches and commentators alike tend to talk about her technique before they talk about her numbers.
That technique has not stopped her adapting to T20 cricket’s demands. The seven sixes against Hong Kong were not slogs; several came off length balls she simply cleared with timing rather than brute force, the same method that has made her one of the more repeatable six-hitters in the women’s game rather than one of the most powerful.
She has opened the batting for India in all three formats for most of her career, which means her contribution shows up on the scoreboard before anyone else’s, good day or bad. That habit of facing the new ball, in Test cricket against the moving pink ball as much as in a T20I powerplay, has shaped how selectors and opposition captains alike plan around her.
Captaincy, the WPL and a World Cup medal
Mandhana took over India’s T20I captaincy in February 2019 at 22 years and 229 days, making her the youngest to lead the side in the format. She led the Trailblazers to the Women’s T20 Challenge title in 2020, and when the Women’s Premier League began in 2023 she was made captain of Royal Challengers Bangalore, a role she still holds.
Her biggest team honour came in 2025, when she was vice-captain as India won the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup on home soil under Harmanpreet Kaur. It was the first world title in the sport for the Indian women’s team, and Mandhana’s runs through that tournament were central to getting them there.
Records that keep arriving
The list of milestones by mid-2026 already ran long before Hong Kong added to it. In June 2025 she became the first Indian woman to score centuries in all three international formats. She scored 763 runs in Women’s T20Is through the 2024 calendar year, more than any other batter managed in that format that year, and reached 4,000 ODI runs faster than any Indian woman before her. In December 2025 she became only the fourth woman to reach 10,000 international runs.
The Hong Kong innings pushed her past Mithali Raj’s long-standing record for most runs in women’s international cricket, a tally of 10,880 runs across formats, and took her centuries in all formats combined to 18, one more than Lanning’s mark. Shafali Verma’s 28 was the next-best score in an Indian innings that reached 193 for 5; Hong Kong were bowled out for 56.
The individual awards have piled up alongside the runs. Mandhana won the Arjuna Award in 2019, has been named ICC Women’s Cricketer of the Year three times, in 2018, 2021 and 2024, and picked up the ICC Women’s ODI Cricketer of the Year award in 2018 and 2024 as well. The BCCI named her its Best International Cricketer in 2018 and again in 2025, and Wisden listed her as its Leading Cricketer in the World for 2025, the year India won the World Cup at home.
In her own words
Mandhana has talked often about growing up watching the players whose records she is now breaking. “Mithali di has been such a legend and a role model. We’ve all grown up watching her bat,” she said after the Hong Kong game, adding that Raj and Lanning were “two of the legends of the game” she measured herself against as a junior cricketer. Raj, watching from outside the game these days, posted her own message once the record fell: “To see you go past my record and become the highest run-scorer in international cricket is a moment I’m genuinely proud of.”
Mandhana’s own account of what drives her return, again and again, to the team rather than to her own tally. “I always felt this is my job. I never thought of anything else than records and numbers and the amount of matches you win for India,” she said. Asked what she hoped her career would mean beyond the scoreboard, she put it simply: “If anything of mine could inspire even like 10% of girls to pick up a bat and ball and start playing cricket, I feel that would be something I’ll always be proud and happy about.”
She is also unwilling to call herself a finished batter, even after fifty international centuries’ worth of experience across formats. “I wouldn’t say that you’re ever complete as a batter or a bowler, and if you feel that, cricket will always show you that you’re not,” she said.
Smriti Mandhana’s five greatest innings across formats
Picking five innings out of a career this long means leaving out plenty of good ones. These are the knocks that either set a personal or national record, or turned a match on their own.
149 vs South Africa, Chennai, Test, June 2024
Mandhana’s highest Test score came in a pink-ball Test in Chennai, an innings built on sound defence early against the moving ball before she opened up once the shine wore off. It remains the benchmark for what a modern Indian opener can do in the format’s longest version.
136 vs South Africa, Bengaluru, ODI, June 2024
Her highest ODI score to date came against the same opposition a few days after that Test century, completing a rare Test-ODI double hundred pair inside one series. She reached three figures inside 90 balls and kept the scoring rate above a run a ball for most of the innings that followed.
135 vs Ireland, Rajkot, ODI, January 2025
Batting at home against Ireland, Mandhana put together one of her more chanceless one-day innings, timing the ball through gaps rather than forcing shots, and gave India a total that was never seriously threatened.
124 not out vs Hong Kong, Dubai, T20I, September 2026
Her highest T20I score, and the innings that took her past Mithali Raj as the leading run-scorer in women’s international cricket. Seven sixes, three of them in one over, turned a routine group match into a record-breaking one.
112 vs England, Trent Bridge, T20I, June 2025
This century in Nottingham completed her set of hundreds in all three formats, the first Indian woman to manage that. It came against an England attack on a used pitch, which made the placement of her shots as important as their power.
India play Pakistan next in the Women’s Asia Cup, on Saturday, with the final to follow. Mandhana will open the batting, as she has done in almost every India innings for well over a decade now, still adding to a runs tally that no Indian woman has matched before her.
