When Renuka Singh is requested to pose for {a photograph}, close to the dressing room on the Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh Cricket Stadium in Raipur, she will get self-conscious. Flashing that shy smile of hers, she requests, “Please take it fast, everyone is looking at me.”
She could really feel uncomfortable on the considered her India-D teammates watching her whereas being photographed, however the truth is that the complete cricket-playing world has been watching her, fascinated, for the final one yr. And what a exceptional yr it has been for the India seamer after making her worldwide debut in Australia again in October 2021.
The 26-year-old is now No. 3 on the ICC rankings for T20I bowlers. And she has established herself as one of many most interesting practitioners of swing bowling in worldwide girls’s cricket.
“I have been swinging the ball right from the beginning,” Renuka tells The Hindu at Raipur, in the course of the Senior Women’s T20 Challenger Trophy. “And I continue to work on my swing; when there are days when I don’t get it right, I look at the video and try to see where I need to improve.”
Emphasising the fundamentals
Pawan Sen, the coach whom Renuka credit for serving to her grow to be the bowler she is, says he was impressed by her want to enhance and the passion with which she performed cricket.
“Maybe she was a bit too enthusiastic when I began coaching her,” he says over the cellphone from Dharamshala. “She would ask me to teach her how to bowl the cutters and how to swing [the ball]. I told her she needed to learn getting the basics like line and length right first.”
But he had little doubt that she was a particular expertise when he first noticed her on the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association’s girls’s academy at Dharamshala. Renuka feels she most likely wouldn’t have grow to be knowledgeable cricketer if that academy hadn’t come up in Himachal.
“So I am grateful that Anurag Thakur [Union Minister and former BCCI president who also headed the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association] started the academy,” Renuka says. “Himachal is a small State and without that academy, girls like me could not have played cricket.”
She used to play the sport at Rohru, about 110 km from Shimla, with boys — her cousins and mates. “The boys always made me bowl,” she remembers. “My father — whom I lost when I was three — was very fond of cricket and kabaddi. My mother told me that he wanted me and my elder brother to play one of those sports. He had even named my brother Vinod, after his favourite cricketer Kambli.”
Renuka’s brother, Pawan says, had made sacrifices in order that she may have a profession in cricket. “It makes me really happy to see Renuka taking the wickets of top batters in women’s cricket, like Meg Lanning,” he says. “But I feel she should have been picked for India earlier. She was feeling low when she was ignored after being the leading wicket-taker among medium-pacers in the domestic one-day tournament a few years ago. I told her about Cheteshwar Pujara, who had been scoring heavily in successive seasons but not getting selected. After getting into the Indian team, I think Renuka has been showing her frustration [at the batters].”
The post-Jhulan period
Her bowling has actually sharpened the Indian assault. In the post-Jhulan Goswami period, her position assumes much more significance. In Jhulan’s final match, the third ODI in opposition to England at Lord’s in September, Renuka took 4 wickets and was the Player-of-the-Match. She needs she had taken one other wicket in that sport, which can ceaselessly be remembered for Deepti Sharma working Charlie Dean out for backing up too far on the non-striker’s finish.
“If I had taken five wickets, I would have made it to the honours board at Lord’s,” she says with a smile. “I have enjoyed bowling in England, where the conditions help me.”
Before the England collection, she was the main wicket-taker within the girls’s cricket competitors on the Commonwealth Games in the identical nation. Her splendid spell in opposition to Australia — 4 for 18 — at Edgbaston, wasn’t sufficient for India, although.
But her three for 5 was sufficient for India to win the Women’s Asia Cup remaining in opposition to Sri Lanka at Sylhet a few months in the past. But she wasn’t glad along with her effort in that match. “I could have bowled better,” she says.
That sentence provides an perception into her strategy to the game. “She is never satisfied with her performance,” says Pawan. “That is one of her strengths. She has always been willing to work hard. She is, of course, very skilful too. I could see at the academy that she is a natural swing bowler.”
He provides that Renuka had been adequate to be fielded in Himachal’s under-19 squad when she was simply 15. “Later on, when I included her in the senior team, I told her that she had to improve her speed, as the level of the competition was going to be much higher. She did that.”
Looking again at her days on the academy, she says she benefited immensely from coaching below Pawan. “The facilities at the academy were very good, too,” she says. “A hat-trick in an Under-19 one-day game — I think it was against Karnataka — gave me a lot of confidence early on. Then after my good shows on the senior circuit, I had been hopeful of making it to the Indian team.”
When she was lastly chosen, for the Australia tour, she was attending the nationwide workforce’s camp at Bengaluru. “I was very happy, especially for my mother, who has worked to make me a cricketer because that was what my father wanted.”
Inspiring kids
Now when she visits house, she is recognised by individuals. “I am glad when little children recognise me,” she says. “It feels nice to know that I could inspire young girls to take up cricket.”
She believes girls’s cricket in India will change with the launch of the Women’s IPL, which is ready to occur inside just a few months. “It will change the attitude of people towards women’s cricket,” says Renuka, who admires the bowling of Zaheer Khan and Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
The feminine bowler who impressed her, Harpreet Dhillon of Punjab, could by no means have performed worldwide cricket however her ability caught Renuka’s eye. “As a young bowler, I marvelled at her ability to swing the ball,” says the reigning queen of swing. “I wanted to bowl like her.”
She additionally desires to bowl in Tests. “I would like to bowl with the red ball,” she says. “There is more scope for swing bowlers like me in Tests. I think India will be able to play more Tests in the future.”
Source: www.thehindu.com