Three Verdicts at Lord's — Indian Cricket's Split Screen

Between 28 June and 19 July, the home of cricket passed judgment on Indian cricket three times. The men, world champions in March, left beaten. The women, knocked out on the same ground three weeks earlier, left with history. The board that runs both was judged too.

Rohit Sharma made 138 at Lord's on Sunday, off 110 balls, with 17 fours and five sixes. It was his 34th one-day international hundred and the first by an Indian man in an ODI at the ground. It was not enough. England had made 387 for 3, the highest ODI total ever recorded at Lord's, and India finished on 360 for 7, 27 runs short. England took the series 2–1, their first ODI series win over India since 2018.

Six days earlier, on the same ground, an Indian team had been the one making history. The women, playing in the first women's Test ever staged at Lord's, beat England by 270 runs. Fifteen days before that, also at Lord's, the same side had been knocked out of the T20 World Cup in the group stage.

Three results, one ground, 22 days. Read together, they amount to three verdicts. The first is on the men, who hold the T20 world title and have lost three consecutive white-ball series abroad since winning it. The second is on the women, whose year has bent the other way. The third is on the Board of Control for Cricket in India, which runs both teams — and whose own numbers say it still prices them very differently.

The first verdict: champions in March, beaten in July

To understand how strange the men's summer has been, start at its peak. On 8 March at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, in front of 86,824 people, Suryakumar Yadav's side made 255 for 5, the highest total in a T20 World Cup final, and bowled New Zealand out for 159 to win by 96 runs. Sanju Samson made 89 off 46 balls and was player of the tournament; Jasprit Bumrah took 4 for 15 and was player of the final. India became the first team to retain the men's T20 World Cup, the first host nation to win it and the first to win it three times. With the 2025 Champions Trophy and Asia Cup already banked, they held virtually every white-ball prize on offer.

June began as business as usual. At home, Afghanistan were beaten by an innings and 300 runs in a one-off Test at New Chandigarh, India's largest innings victory in Test cricket, and then swept 3–0 in the ODIs.

Then the team crossed to Belfast. In two T20Is at Stormont, the first of them Shreyas Iyer's first match as India's full-time T20I captain, Ireland won by 34 runs on 26 June and by one run on 28 June. It was Ireland's first win over India in any format, and it ended a run of 16 consecutive T20I series wins.

England confirmed it. The first T20I, at Chester-le-Street on 1 July, was washed out; England won the other four, the last by 56 runs at Southampton on 11 July after Jos Buttler and Harry Brook added 233 for the second wicket. The reigning world champions in the format had lost six completed T20Is in a row.

The ODIs offered a reprieve that did not last. At Edgbaston on 14 July, Axar Patel took four wickets and made 57 as India chased 259 to win by six wickets, Shubman Gill retiring hurt with cramp on 80. Two days later in Cardiff, India were bowled out for 233 in 44 overs, and England got home by four wickets with 35 balls to spare, Joe Root unbeaten on 99.

Sunday's decider deserves its own paragraph. Ben Duckett and Jacob Bethell opened with 192. Duckett's 141 off 135 balls is the highest men's ODI score at Lord's, passing Viv Richards's 138 in the 1979 World Cup final. Bethell made 91, Root 74 not out off 48 and Buttler 41 not out off 13, as England took 82 off the last five overs. The 387 beat the ground's previous ODI record, England's 334 for 4 against India at the 1975 World Cup. India's reply was defiance. Rohit and Gill put on 147 for the first wicket, Gill made 77 and Virat Kohli 74, before Sam Curran's 4 for 75 closed the chase. The match aggregate of 747 runs was the highest in an ODI at Lord's.

The retirement talk that followed Rohit through the tour — he is 39, and has already left Test and T20I cricket — was denied by the BCCI secretary, Devajit Saikia, while the series was still on. After the match, Gill said Rohit had "not told us anything". Rohit's own answer, in a video released by the board, was characteristically short: "If there's no noise, there's no fun."

A team does not become bad in four months, and the T20 world title is real. But the shape since Ahmedabad is plain: two home wins against Afghanistan, then three consecutive white-ball series lost abroad, against opposition ranging from Ireland to England, across both limited-overs formats. The T20I side has a new captain and new faces; Suryansh Shedge and Prince Yadav made their debuts in Belfast. The ODI top order still leans on two batters aged 39 and 37. The world title is real. So is the slide.

The second verdict: a crown, a stumble, an answer

The women's year bends the other way, and it begins with the night Indian cricket had waited decades for. On 2 November 2025, at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, Harmanpreet Kaur's side beat South Africa by 52 runs to win India's first Women's World Cup. Shafali Verma made 87 and took two wickets to be player of the final; Deepti Sharma, with 215 runs and 22 wickets, was player of the tournament. The semi-final three days earlier had produced the highest successful chase in women's ODI history: Australia made 338, and India reached their target of 339 with nine balls to spare, Jemimah Rodrigues unbeaten on 127.

The T20 World Cup in England was supposed to extend that story. It didn't. India beat Pakistan, the Netherlands and Bangladesh but lost to South Africa, in a game where Marizanne Kapp was dropped at least twice, and arrived at Lord's on 28 June needing to beat Australia. Harmanpreet's 56 off 27 balls, her fifty coming off 25, lifted India to 170 for 4. Ellyse Perry made 56 and Ashleigh Gardner an unbeaten 53 as Australia got home in 19 overs: the highest successful chase in Women's T20 World Cup history, and a second straight T20 World Cup without a knockout appearance for India. Australia went on to beat England in the final, at Lord's on 5 July, for a record seventh title.

The numbers explain the exit as well as the scorecard does. By the end of the league stage India had conceded runs faster than every team that reached the semi-finals.

India's head coach, Amol Muzumdar, said his bowling and fielding had not helped the cause, while defending the intent of his batters. His spinners had taken 29 of India's 34 wickets, and he called the attack "very inexperienced as far as international cricket is concerned". Then he asked for time.

“Give us 18 months and this attack will be a different one.”

What happened next is why this team's trajectory still points up. Twelve days after the exit, India returned to Lord's for the first women's Test ever played there, 142 years after the ground staged its first men's Test. England put them in. Smriti Mandhana made 83, Harmanpreet 58 and Deepti 57 in a first innings of 285. Then Kranti Gaud, a 22-year-old seamer from Madhya Pradesh, took 5 for 37 — the first five-wicket haul in a women's Test at Lord's — and England were bowled out for 170. In the second innings Yastika Bhatia made 113 off 158 balls, the first century in a women's Test at the ground, and Mandhana added 70 before the declaration at 341 for 7. Set 457, England were all out for 186 on the fourth day, Sneh Rana taking 4 for 42.

The margin was India's second-largest by runs in women's Tests, behind the 347-run win over England in Navi Mumbai in 2023, and the biggest by any visiting team against England. Heather Knight and Tammy Beaumont, both World Cup winners at this ground in 2017, played their last internationals; Gaud bowled Beaumont first ball of England's second innings and had Knight caught at short leg for 13. India have now played 10 Tests in England without defeat — three wins, seven draws.

The T20 failure was real, and the review it demands should be real too. India's pace bowling and their middle order in the shortest format remain unsolved. But teams reveal themselves in how they answer elimination. This one answered by winning, by a distance, the first women's Test the ground had ever staged.

The third verdict: the board that runs both

The BCCI picks, pays and schedules both of these teams, and on the women's side it has moved further than most boards in the game. In October 2022 it equalised match fees, so a woman playing a Test for India earns ₹15 lakh, an ODI ₹6 lakh and a T20I ₹3 lakh, the same as a man. In 2023 it launched the Women's Premier League. Gaud's route to Lord's ran straight through that system: a domestic one-day title with Madhya Pradesh, a WPL contract with UP Warriorz, an ODI debut in May 2025, a World Cup winners' medal six months later.

The board's other numbers tell a different story. Its 2025–26 central contracts, announced on 9 February, pay its women ₹50 lakh, ₹30 lakh and ₹10 lakh a year across three grades. Gaud and Bhatia — the two names now written into the Lord's record books — are both in Grade C, on ₹10 lakh. The board withheld the men's retainer figures this cycle; in the previous one, its men's grades A, B and C paid ₹5 crore, ₹3 crore and ₹1 crore, which put the lowest men's grade at ten times the lowest women's. The rewards for winning a world title were ₹51 crore for the women's ODI World Cup in November and ₹131 crore for the men's T20 World Cup in March.

None of this explains a dropped catch at Lord's or a missed chase in Cardiff. But Lord's passed a verdict on the board's choices as well as its players. Where the BCCI has invested in its women — equal match fees, a professional league — it is being repaid in results: a world title, a record Test, a 22-year-old fast bowler with her name on cricket's oldest stage. Its contracts and its bonuses have not caught up with that. And the team it rewards most is the one now going backwards, through a transition the board is managing in plain sight: a new full-time T20I captain, Rohit and Kohli moved down to Grade B in February after leaving two formats, and an ODI top order whose future its own secretary was asked about in the middle of a series.

What comes next

The men's schedule offers little respite and plenty of 50-over cricket. A three-match T20I series in Zimbabwe starts this week, Tests in Sri Lanka follow next month, and the ODI calendar runs through three matches against West Indies at the end of September, five in New Zealand in November and three against Sri Lanka at home in December — all of it building towards the 2027 World Cup in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Each of those series will be read as a referendum on Rohit, on Kohli and on the selectors.

The women's clock started on 28 June. Muzumdar has asked for 18 months to remake his attack; on the evidence of Lord's, the raw material is there. The Asian Games in Aichi–Nagoya in September, where India defend the title they won in Hangzhou, are the next checkpoint.

Indian cricket has never held this much silverware at once. What July clarified is which of its teams is still climbing. Two Indian sides walked off at Lord's this month. Only one of them left the future feeling closer.