MUMBAI: The Indian women’s cricket team may have suffered an early exit from the 2026 Women’s World Cup T20, but India will still have representation in the tournament’s biggest game — and in historic fashion.Vrinda Rathi, who hails from Nerul in Navi Mumbai, has been named by the International Cricket Council (ICC) as one of the on-field umpires for the Women’s World Cup T20 final between hosts England and Australia at the iconic Lord’s Cricket Ground on Sunday. She will judge alongside Jacquline Williams.Rath’s appointment marks a significant milestone as she becomes the first Indian woman referee to officiate in a Women’s World Cup final. She is also only the second Indian umpire to officiate in an ICC World Cup final after Ram Babu Gupta, who officiated the 1987 Men’s World Cup final at the Eden Gardens alongside Pakistan’s Mahboob Shah. Match umpire GS Lakshmi, meanwhile, officiated the 2023 and 2024 Women’s T20 World Cup finals.The 37-year-old Rathi has built an impressive umpiring career, appearing in 20 Women’s One Day Internationals, 77 Women’s T20 Internationals and one Women’s Test match.“She is a good, hard-working umpire. She is among the best umpires in the ICC women’s game. She was originally a scorer. Then she became an umpire at my insistence. ‘You can have a career as an umpire,’ I told her. In 2014, Rathi passed the umpiring exam conducted by the Mumbai Cricket Association and four years later she passed the umpiring exam conducted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (2018). Within a year (2020), she, along with Narayanan Janani, has been promoted to the ICC’s panel of umpires,” Ganesh Iyer, former BCCI umpire and former president of the Mumbai Cricket Association’s umpires committee, told TOI.Before taking up umpiring, Rathi was a middle player and represented the Mumbai University women’s team for four years, although she failed to break into the Mumbai senior women’s side.Rathi created history in December 2023 when she became the first Indian woman to umpire a women’s Test match, standing in a one-off Test between India and England at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai.Her rise through the ranks of judges was rapid. In 2022, she judged at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. On 10 January 2023, she, along with Janani Narayanan, became one of the first women to referee a men’s domestic match in India, refereeing a Ranji Trophy match between Goa and Pondicherry.In 2023, Rathi also refereed the Women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa, stood in the final of the inaugural Women’s Premier League and was part of the refereeing panel at the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.
