India's group game against Hong Kong, China on September 3 was supposed to be a formality on the way to Saturday's decider against Pakistan. Instead, Smriti Mandhana turned it into one of the most record-heavy innings women's T20 cricket has seen this year, with an unbeaten-adjacent 124 off 64 balls that carried India to 193/5 and, eventually, a 137-run win.
Mandhana's hundred came off 58 balls — reached by cutting Hong Kong's Marina Lamplough through backward point — and she finished with 14 fours and seven sixes in an innings that never really let Hong Kong's bowlers settle. India were bowled out for nothing close to their total; Hong Kong's chase collapsed to 56 all out in 16.2 overs, with Deepti Sharma (3/9), Nandani Sharma (2/6), Shree Charani (2/16) and Prema Rawat (2/12) sharing the wickets. The 137-run margin was comfortably India's biggest of the tournament so far.
The individual numbers are substantial enough that they are worth listing carefully rather than compressed into one blanket claim. Mandhana's 124 is now the highest individual score in Women's T20 Asia Cup history, passing Chamari Athapaththu's 119 not out against Malaysia in 2024. It was also her 18th international century, taking her past Australia's Meg Lanning for the most centuries scored in women's international cricket, and it made her the first Indian woman to score two T20I hundreds. Separately, the innings pushed her past Mithali Raj's career total of 10,868 international runs — a mark Raj herself had set by passing England's Charlotte Edwards — making Mandhana the outright leading run-scorer in the history of women's international cricket, across every country that plays the format. BCCI secretary Jay Shah publicly congratulated Mandhana on the innings after the match.
Analysis: records accumulated in a lopsided group game against a team near the bottom of Group A are still real, but they matter more for what they signal about form than for the opposition they came against. Mandhana has now scored two T20I centuries within the same calendar year of a career that already carried a heavy statistical weight, and she does it as India's vice-captain walking out to open the batting in must-win knockout-adjacent fixtures. Whatever the numbers say about history, the more immediate question is whether this form travels into a genuinely contested game — and India get an answer to that within 48 hours.
The win also does India's net run rate no harm heading into the September 5 clash with Pakistan, a match both sides go into unbeaten with the group's top seed on the line. India's head-to-head record against Pakistan in women's T20Is is heavily one-sided in India's favour, with Pakistan's rare wins coming mostly at global ICC events — but that history counts for little in a genuine title-race fixture, and Harmanpreet Kaur has already described the intensity of playing Pakistan as unmatched by any other opponent.
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Match figures and the record claims above are verified against same-day reporting and BCCI/ICC statistical coverage of Mandhana's innings, current as of September 4, 2026.
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