England women seal first ODI series win in India for 17 years

England’s women won a one-day international series in India for the first time since 2009 on Sunday, bowling the hosts out for 178 in pursuit of 241 to take the deciding third match by 62 runs in front of a crowd of 24,000 in Rajkot.

The win, which gives England the series 2-1 after losing the opening game by seven wickets, was built on a half-century of considerable patience from the captain, Eleanor Whitlock, who made 74 from 103 balls on a slow pitch, and then dismantled by Mollie Fairbrother, the 22-year-old Leicestershire seamer, whose 5-28 was the best return by an England woman in India.

India had reached 91 for one in the 19th over and looked comfortable when Fairbrother, bowling into the breeze from the pavilion end, took three wickets in nine balls, two of them lbw with the ball nipping back off the seam and the third a top edge to the keeper from a short ball the batter had no need to play. The hosts lost nine wickets for 87.

“I did not do anything different,” Fairbrother said. “I hit a length and the pitch did the rest. Ellie told me before the spell to bowl like it was Grace Road in April and that was about the size of it.”

Whitlock’s innings had looked, at the time, too slow: England were 118 for four after 30 overs and the captain was being booed by sections of the crowd for refusing to take on the spinners. But a late stand of 68 in nine overs with the wicketkeeper Saskia Devereux, who made 41 from 29 balls, lifted the total to a score that proved more than adequate. “People were saying it was 30 short,” Whitlock said. “It was 62 too many. I would rather be boring and win.”

The series was played as a stand-alone tour after the planned Twenty20 leg was moved to February to accommodate a domestic franchise competition, a decision that irritated the England and Wales Cricket Board but that India’s board said was non-negotiable. England’s head coach, Nathan Pryce, said the tour had been “worth every hour on the bus”.

The win moves England to second in the ICC Women’s Championship table, which decides automatic qualification for the 2029 World Cup, and ends a run of four consecutive bilateral series defeats in Asia. Fairbrother, who was playing club cricket in Leicester two years ago, was named player of the series with 11 wickets at 14.

England fly home on Tuesday. Their next assignment is a three-match series against New Zealand at home in June, by which time, Whitlock said, “people will have forgotten we were ever in Rajkot. I will not.”