As India win Women’s World Cup, Amol Muzumdar gets love back from the sport he loved for all those years as nearest among nearly men

“Sir’s contribution in the last two and a half years has been amazing,” Harmanpreet would beam in the press conference later. “A lot changed in our dressing room after his arrival. Before that, coaches were changing frequently; we didn’t know how to bring things forward. But after Sir came, everything became stable and smooth. He gets a lot of credit for building this team.”

Waiting, waiting

He has not always been calm. In his playing days, his long-time colleague Wasim Jaffer remembers, he was often short-tempered. “Not in a negative sense, but he did not tolerate any nonsense. It’s understandable, you play for Bombay, and play at a time when Bombay was really strong. Just to break into the line-up was difficult. There was Sachin (Tendulkar), Vinod (Kambli), (Sanjay) Manjrekar and Pravin (Amre). To break into the team itself needs a lot of determination and toughness, and he reached there on the back of pure determination,” he tells The Indian Express.

Mumbai cricket in the nineties was not a place for the faint-hearted. But, fuelled by desire and the dream of playing cricket, instilled by his father who was a club cricketer, he not only survived but thrived in that tough world. From reeling out 260 against Haryana on his debut, he averaged 83.78 in his first four seasons. In the first seven domestic seasons, his lowest seasonal average was 46.35. Labelled the ‘next Tendulkar’, his name did the rounds as the next big batsman from Mumbai. It remained but a wish. Those around him, and other run-making colossus, met their rewards.

Three of the young teammates who played in his debut game under Ravi Shastri went onto play Test cricket. Samir Dighe, Sairaj Bahutule, and Paras Mhambrey. An entire eleven could be made of his Mumbai contemporaries who turned up for the country– Abey Kuruvilla, Nilesh Kuklarni, Wasim Jaffer, Ramesh Powar, and Jatin Paranjpe, to name but a few. He survived generational shifts — his last game for Mumbai featured Rohit Sharma and Ajinkya Rahane, waiting for their Test shifts. But Muzumdar waited and waited, like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot’s arrival in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. A career of 11,167 runs went unrewarded. He would famously say: “Cricket gave me everything but the Test cap.”

India’s coach Amol Muzumdar with the Indian tricolour after the team won the ICC Women’s World Cup 2025. (PHOTO: PTI)

By the stroke of the century, he knew his chances were grim. The reign of the Fab Four had begun. “It was a frustrating period for him. Rahul, VVS and Sourav had nailed the spots. You could sense his frustration, but he never let those spill into the middle. Once he crossed the line, he never let personal disappointments affect him. He was always a committed professional, even when he turned up for Assam and other teams,” Jaffer remembers.

Long after he had made peace with his career, he confessed to R Ashwin on his YouTube show about his disappointments. “At one stage, I almost gave up the game; I put my kit bag at the top of the cupboard and did not appear on the ground – I gave up Ranji Trophy cricket. I left one game, I came back home and I said to my wife, ‘I don’t want to play cricket anymore. I’ll do something else.’ I did not touch the bat for one month. But slowly my father got me back into the game and eventually, I went on to play for 10 more years,” he told Ashwin.

The game has strange ways to reward its committed devotees. Twelve years after he bid farewell to batting, he realised that cricket truly loved him back too. He shed the nearly man tag. People would no longer look sympathetically at him, but with pride and joy, he became a figure to be celebrated, he etched an imperishable legacy. He would no longer be remembered as the boy that waited eternally for his turn to come; the defining image being him padded up to bat for the Shardashram School, only to be kept waiting by the monstrous stand between Tendulkar and Kambli. But as the man who fired India’s women cricketers to their first global conquest.

Stern when needed

Sometimes, though, the old khadoosi self would emerge. He could be tough when he wants to. After the three defeats midway through the tournament, he had a frank and stern chat with the players “That day, sir was a little aggressive, in a good way,” Harmanpreet told JioStar. “But everyone took it positively because we knew whatever he was saying came from a good place, and he was right. We all trust him completely, and his message came from the heart,” she added. Muzumdar shrugged it off as, “just had a little chat with the players.” Whatever the crux of the conversation, it sparked a revival leading to India’s march. The conversation snippet revealed the team’s trust in him, the respect and love he commands, and the vibes of a happy and ambitious team. Jaffer observes: “I feel he has mellowed considerably, as a coach I think you have to. Coaching is a different cup of tea and you can’t coach the way you played. You can only prepare them and watch them from a distance. You need to be patient and it looks like he has been.”

Times were different when he took over the reins in 2023. Speculations of rifts within the team floated, the team’s form swung between the banal and spectacular. The early days were tough. Australia blanked India at home, India lost to Bangladesh and New Zealand. India possessed the ingredients to transform into a world-beating group, but not the chemistry or mentality. Muzumdar helped assemble the scattered parts to construct a title-winning machine.

In his first press conference in charge of the women’s team, he stressed on fitness. Two years on, India did not wither in the skin-burning humidity of Navi Mumbai. “He infused the belief that everyone in the team is a match-winner,” Smriti Mandhana said last year. “Our mindset has changed a bit now, regardless of the team we are facing and the format. We focus on what we can pull off and always talk about positive things and apply the same on the ground,” she added. He was not reluctant to drop the big names, Jemimah Rodrigues and Shafali Verma for instance, but ensured that they did not wallow in negativity and they returned stronger. So they did, defining the semi-final and final. He shuffled batting line-ups to shake players out of their comfort zones. He forged a sense of unity. Richa Ghosh testifies: “I think he kept everyone together. And I think he had a lot of positive vibes. He helped everyone a lot. Especially me, he always backed me.”

One by one, the pieces of destiny fell in place, and India orchestrated a “watershed moment”, as described by Muzumdar. And Muzumdar’s unflinching love for the game was reciprocated. He was averse to dwelling on his long-gone days. but the past rigours only make the rosy present sweeter. But somewhere in the Bollywood corner, an eager scriptwriter would have already conceived the first frame of the Muzumdar movie.