The 2017 Women’s World Cup must be holding a special place in Smriti Mandhana’s heart. It was the very tournament that made the India batting star a household name thanks to her stunning exploits in the tournament. She began the World Cup with a knock of 90 against hosts and eventual winners England.

In the very next game, she scored an impressive ton in the win over West Indies. Mandhana’s exploits helped India storm into the World Cup final against all the odds before their stunning campaign came to an end with a narrow loss to England in the title-decider. Since that tournament, Mandhana has gone from strength to strength.

In 2018, the ICC awarded her with the Rachael Heyhoe-Flint Award for the best female cricketer of the year. She was also named the ODI Player of the Year by the ICC at the same time after ending the year as the leading run-scorer in Women’s ODIs with 669 at an average of 66.90. Now more than two years after the stunning run in England, Mandhana recently opened up about how the tournament changed things for her and women’s cricket.

 Smriti Mandhana’s popularity

Speaking on Cricbuzz’s Spicy Pitch, Smriti Mandhana revealed how her impressive performances against England and West Indies made her hugely popular on social media. She also spoke about how low the expectations were from the team as the authorities had booked the return tickets beforehand, assuming that India would not go past the group stage.

“My Twitter was deleted and I didn’t know what was Instagram. I just knew that one day I was on 200 followers and in five days, I had 299K followers and I was like log pagal hogaya” said Smriti Mandhana.

“No one expected us to be in finals so we had our tickets booked beforehand,” she added before speaking about the crazy reception she and her teammates got after returning from England.

Here is the full interview:

Mandhana, meanwhile, was recently in Australia for the T20I tri-series and the Women’s T20 World Cup. India made it to the final of both the events before losing to hosts Australia. She had a poor campaign in the World Cup as she could not get past the 17-run mark in four innings of the tournament.