Producing quotes from great philosophers and then appreciating their beauty, inner strength etc, etc on this day is a clichéd way to salute the power of Woman on the International Women’s Day. A better way to put things in perspective is to give an example of how the fairer sex has actually survived and stood tall amongst every sphere of life where the laws have been framed by men.
 

Cricket was first literally known to be a gentleman’s game. The game started as ‘for the gentlemen, by the gentlemen and of the gentlemen. Slowly being a gentleman’s game became a colloquial term and off late, there are hardly any gentlemen left. But amongst all the records and statistical milestones the ‘gentlemen’ have achieved over the years, the superhuman effort of scoring a double ton in an ODI was the most talked about.
 

If you think that it was a man or a superman who first scored a double ton in an ODI, hold on it was a woman. Record books do say that Sachin Tendulkar became the first to score a double ton in an ODI in February 2010 and then his cricketing clone Virender Sehwag bettered the effort in March 2011. But factually they were the first few men to have scored a double ton in an ODI.
 

The first double ton in an ODI was actually scored by former Australia captain Belinda Clark. Way back in 1997, during the Women’s World Cup being held in India, Clark chose Danish women to be her guinea pigs scoring an unbeaten 229 at the spiritual home of Indian cricket Mumbai.
 

Though Clark piled on the runs on a small-in-size MIG Ground, Bandra and that too against a timid opponent like Denmark, numbers still stand tall. One of the Siddhuisms stands true here that ‘Statistics are like mini-skirts, they reveal more than they hide’. It is clear that the first to touch the Peak 200 in an ODI was a woman and not a man.
 

The day Tendulkar did the unthinkable, nobody did once bother actually to say that Tendulkar was the second player and only the first man in ODIs to have achieved the summit. Though women’s cricket is never much talked about but then the numbers can’t be ignored.
 

So what if men took bat in their hands way before the women did. Some correctly said: “Even God created man before woman.  But then you always make a rough draft before the final masterpiece.”