By all measurements so far in the T20 World Cup, Australia and England should win the semifinals and play a full octane final on Sunday that will display all that is good about the future of women’s cricket. Those two teams — the most well-resourced and deepest of the 10 participants in the tournament — have played an aggressive style that has seen them dominate the group stages. Australia was playing a different game to their rivals in Group 1, which included the Proteas. Su e they had problems against Bangladesh in Gqeberha but as South Africa found out on Tuesday night at Newlands, the Bangladeshi new ball bowlers Marufa Akter and Nahida Akter are two of the best young bowlers in the game and will get better with more experience. What England and Australia have managed to do that other teams, including their semifinal rivals, South Africa, and India haven’t, is implement the attacking batting they have talked about. It hasn’t always succeeded, but the mindset has been clear and even when they had problems at the start, the rest of the batting order has continued to apply the aggressive ethos and overwhelmed rivals in the process. England’s victory over Pakistan was a perfect example. It was as Nat Sciver-Brunt, who scored an unbeaten 81 off 40 balls, said a “free chance to show off a bit” given England had already qualified, but it was also about playing in the modern way. Former England men’s captain Nasser Hussein, working as a TV commentator during the tournament, made the point earlier that batting in the women’s game was changing from one that was previously exclusively about touch play to a power game, where athletes like Sciver-Brunt and Australia’s Tahlia McGrath now calculate their innings in the modern way, starting with: can the ball be hit for six or four and if not, only then settling for a single or something else. Sciver-Brunt explained how their new coach John Lewis has found obscure records for his side to chase to focus their minds on playing more aggressively. On Tuesday England set a new record for the highest total in a World Cup match and subsequently achieved the largest winning margin for any T20 World Cup. “He is finding random records that we have beaten, not the standard ones. But it is important for us to be pushing ourselves and pushing our standards higher and higher,” said Sciver-Brunt. Both England and Australia have been helped by the fact that their players have home franchise tournaments in which they participate — The Hundred and Big Bash respectively. Those competitions allow players to express and test themselves in a less pressurised environment, and transfer those lessons to the international game. It is something India hopes to mimic once the Women’s Premier League takes off next month. Harmanpreet Kaur’s team certainly has the young talent to enable it to follow the example set by the English and Australians and exposure for their junior players, who recently won the inaugural ICC under-19 women’s World Cup, to the likes of Sciver-Brunt, McGrath, Ashleigh Gardner and Marizanne Kapp, who will all play in the WPL, will only accelerate that process. India haven’t managed to implement their attacking style yet, but they have proof of how it works thanks to Kaur’s historic knock in the 2017 50-over semifinal. She scored 171* off 115 balls in that match, eliminating the Australians in one of the great World Cup shocks and elevating the status of the women’s game in cricket’s biggest market. India were also the only team to inflict a defeat on the Australians at the last T20 World Cup in 2020, although the home team got revenge in emphatic style in the final. India won’t shy away from attacking Australia on Thursday. They have the weapons with the bat in big hitting Shafali Verma, the elegance of Smriti Mandhana, Richa Ghosh’s flamboyance and Kaur’s experience to put Australia under pressure. India and SA, underdogs in the semis, will have to match their opponents’ aggression — it’s the way the women’s game is moving. .