I got here throughout a gaggle of younger ladies — a French translator, a make-up artist and a home-maker — on the Cricket Club of India (CCI) in Mumbai shortly after the ultimate of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) final month. They have been blissful: their group, Mumbai Indians, had simply gained the inaugural version of the WPL. Though they comply with cricket, it was the primary time that they have been watching ladies’s cricket. They aren’t alone. The WPL has created a fan base of hundreds of thousands for ladies’s cricket in India, going by the eyeballs that the WPL attracted for over three weeks in March.
Not that ladies’s cricket wasn’t in style in India earlier than the WPL. I keep in mind reporting on an India-Australia Women’s ODI sequence earlier than a full home on the Reliance Cricket Stadium in Vadodara 5 years in the past. The Hindu had printed the total scoreboard together with the match report at a time when ladies’s cricket bought little area within the media. But the WPL has remodeled ladies’s cricket. By the time the WPL participant public sale was carried out in Mumbai in February, the Indian media had woken as much as ladies’s cricket. Like the venues — the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and the D.Y. Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai — the press packing containers too have been crowded for the WPL matches, which was not the case earlier.
It is certainly good to see our feminine cricketers getting their due. Listening to their life tales has been an interesting expertise over the previous few years. They aren’t simply fantastic cricketers, however fantastic ladies as properly. For occasion, one is unlikely to fulfill a extra humble star in any discipline than Ellyse Perry, the Australian all-rounder who has gained eight cricket World Cups and scored a aim in a soccer World Cup. New Zealand’s Sophie Devine has a wonderful sense of humour. Her reputation rose sharply in India after her beautiful knock (99 off 36 balls) towards Royal Challengers Bangalore. When I requested the ladies on the CCI about their highlights of the WPL, they referred to that innings. They additionally informed me in regards to the Indian gamers they admired, comparable to Harleen Deol. The dialog jogged my memory of my interview with Smriti Mandhana. The goddess of the off-side — to borrow and barely change an expression that Rahul Dravid used to explain Sourav Ganguly — had informed me that she was blissful to seek out that folks had begun to provide a reputation to the Indian feminine cricketer: earlier, it was the lady who bowled left-arm spin, now it was Radha Yadav. Our feminine cricketers at the moment are mobbed, have an enormous following on social media and appeared always in commercials in the course of the WPL.
Shubhangi Kulkarni, the previous Indian captain whose leg-spin helped the Indian ladies rating their first ever Test victory (towards the West Indies in 1976), by no means had experiences like these. Not that she complains. Last 12 months, once I went to Pune to cowl the Women’s T20 Challenge — the precursor to the WPL —I met her. We have been speaking on the telephone for years; she is articulate and pleasant. We met at her store, Sunny’s Sports Boutique, which she arrange together with Sunil Gavaskar and former Baroda cricketer Jairaj Mehta. Sitting on the money counter, she informed me at size in regards to the early days of girls’s cricket in India, when gamers like her travelled on unreserved practice compartments and spent from their very own pockets. The clients who got here there to purchase cricket gear most likely had no concept that they have been interacting with a former India captain. Just a little later, we have been joined by her India teammate, Nilima Jogalekar, who informed me in regards to the first prize she bought from cricket. It was a glucose biscuit.
Source: www.thehindu.com