At the end of the match she commented: “I didn’t get a chance to bat in the whole tournament!” She more than that made up for it in the crucial semi-final. It was really a whirlwind innings, especially in the context of the game and the tournament.

India made a disastrous start and was at 6-1 and then at 35-2. Even at 101-3 we were in a precarious position because our captain, sheet anchor and top scorer in the tournament Mithali Raj got out after a really slow 36 off 61.

But after that it was Kaur all the way. Her 171 is all the more commendable because Raj’s 36 was the second highest score of the Indian innings. That means she got more than 60% of the team’s score and that’s a rarity.

Her clean hitting sixes had the crowd in raptures and at no stage did she look like she was getting out. That is after you leave the runouts. When she was on 98, she ran a single and then there was a mix-up and a sure shot run out.

Australia totally botched it up and Kaur looked like she had made it, but the third umpire was consulted. Kaur was furious and looked like she would explode and didn’t have time to celebrate her century after she was declared not out.

But she did get another chance all the same when she reached a landmark 150.

It didn’t seem like that at the beginning of the match, though. In her first 50 balls, Kaur made just 36 runs. Then she was 130 off 100. That means she made an amazing 94 off the next 50 balls. She made 45 runs off her last 15 balls (a strike rate of 300%!) and it is clear that she would have hit a double century had there been no rain and had India played their full quota of 50 overs.

Australian Belinda Clark has a double century against her name, but that was with Denmark. A few months back Deepti Sharma hit a 188, but that was against Ireland. While Kaur just hit the fifth highest women’s ODI score of all time, it definitely could be called the greatest if you look at the context of the innings.

To hit 171 off just 115 balls against the six-time World Champions Australia in a crunch WWC semi-final when your team has got off to an abysmal start and nobody else has scored even a 50 in a rain-curtailed 42 over match is really special.

If you look at the top five all time women’s ODI scores, then she has the highest strike rate at 148.7. When there’s a vote for the greatest ODI batting innings of all time in women’s cricket, then Kaur is sure a strong contender!

282 is a formidable target in a 42 over game in women’s cricket in a World Cup knockout. Australia is by far the best team in women’s cricket. They played like champions at the beginning of the innings, but Kaur simply demolished them bit by bit.

The Aussie bowlers looked totally clueless and simply didn’t know how to bowl to Kaur. The Indian women scored an astonishing 129 runs in the last 10 overs! That’s power hitting of the highest order in the slog overs.

The amount of times that Kaur ran down the wicket with an aggression rarely seen was a sight to behold. Had she missed any one of those balls, then she would have been stumped by a mile. But that never happened.

All hail to Kaur, the newest Stormtrooper in town.

During the first WWC in 1973, England captain Baroness Heyhoe Flint stated…

“This is my main ambition to try and get women's cricket accepted just as a sport in exactly the same way that golf is accepted or swimming or athletics or tennis. So you know, the school boys and school girls will have their cricket heroines instead of their cricket heroes.”

Well, Harmanpreet Kaur is the latest heroine from the world of international cricket!