Mumbai Indians captain Harmanpreet Kaur with her teammates, team staff and team owner Nita Ambani with the Women’s Premier League 2023 trophy at the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai. , Photo Credit: ANI
I A group of young women – a French translator, a make-up artist and a homemaker – met at the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai soon after the final of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) last month. He was ecstatic: his team, the Mumbai Indians, had recently won the inaugural edition of the WPL. Although they follow cricket, this was the first time they were watching women’s cricket. They are not alone. The WPL has created a fan base of millions for women’s cricket in India, which attracted the WPL for more than three weeks in March.
It is not that women’s cricket was not popular in India before WPL. I remember reporting on an India-Australia women’s ODI series to a packed house at the Reliance Cricket Stadium in Vadodara five years ago. Hindu Published full scoreboards with match reports at a time when women’s cricket received little media attention. But WPL has changed women’s cricket. By the time the WPL players’ auction took place in Mumbai in February, the Indian media had woken up to women’s cricket. Like the venues—the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai—the press boxes also saw crowds for WPL matches, which was not the case earlier.
It is really good to see that our women cricketers are getting their due. It has been a fascinating experience listening to their life stories over the years. She is not only a great cricketer, but also a wonderful woman. One is unlikely to meet a more humble star in any field than, for example, Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry, who has won eight Cricket World Cups and scored one goal in one Football World Cup. The sense of humor of New Zealand’s Sophie Devine is amazing. His popularity in India grew rapidly after his brilliant innings (99 off 36 balls) against Royal Challengers Bangalore. When I asked the women in CCI about their highlights from WPL, they mentioned that innings. He also told me about Indian players he used to admire, like Harleen Deol. The conversation reminded me of my interview with Smriti Mandhana. The goddess of the off-side – to borrow and transform an expression that Rahul Dravid used to describe Sourav Ganguly – told me she was happy to discover that people were beginning to give Indian women cricketers a name: first, it was she. There was a girl who used to bowl left arm spin, now she was Radha Yadav. Our women cricketers are now in the limelight, have massive followership on social media and are frequent appearances in advertisements during the WPL.
Shubhangi Kulkarni, the former Indian captain whose leg-spin helped the Indian women secure their maiden Test victory (against the West Indies in 1976), never had such experiences. Not that she complains. Last year, when I went to Pune to cover the Women’s T20 Challenge – the precursor to the WPL – I met her. We’ve been talking on the phone for years; He is outspoken and friendly. We met at his shop Sunny Sports Boutique, which he founded along with Sunil Gavaskar and former Baroda cricketer Jairaj Mehta. Sitting at the cash counter, she told me in detail about the early days of women’s cricket in India, when players like her traveled in unreserved train compartments and spent out of their own pockets. The customers who came there to buy cricket equipment probably had no idea that they were interacting with the former India captain. A short while later, we were joined by his Indian team-mate Neelima Joglekar, who told me about her first prize from cricket. It was a glucose biscuit.
ajithkumar.pk@thehindu.co.in