Kolkata: Jemimah Rodrigues is going places. In the Caribbean recently for Trinbago Knight Riders; bound for the UAE in a few weeks for the T20 World Cup, and then off to Australia as Brisbane Heat’s platinum-round overseas draft for the Women’s Big Bash League—rarely has Rodrigues’s international calendar been this busy. Rodrigues however isn’t alone on this quest to establish herself as a T20 globetrotter. Deepti Sharma, Smriti Mandhana, Shikha Pandey, Yastika Bhatia and Dayalan Hemalatha are on this list too, as for the first time since the 2021 have more than five Indians been picked in the WBBL.
Cricket, at least in the shortest format, is a lot about beating the odds driven by matchups and analysis with skill and power. And in the cut-throat world of franchise cricket, expect no team to spend on a player just for the heck of it. Which lends further context to this considerable weightage given to Indian players in the most competitive T20 league.
It’s not only a vindication of Sharma and Rodrigues’s growing repertoire but also validation of the groundwork put in by Pandey in the form of club cricket in Queensland and the string of impressive scores by Bhatia as wicketkeeper-batter. Having already made a splash in England’s The Hundred, this WBBL draft highlights Indian players’ coming of age as T20 professionals after their initial splash in 2021.
And it hasn’t taken much time either, given India’s first appearance in a T20 World Cup final was only in 2020. Some players were already turning heads in the run-up to that though. Harmanpreet Kaur wasn’t drafted this time but she was setting the precedent in England and Australia long before women’s cricket had found a more permanent footing in India. Mandhana—who at AU$65,000 is a bit of a steal signing for Adelaide Strikers—too arrived in her shadows to further raise the bar. “I rank her (Mandhana) in the top five players in the world right now,” West Indies’ Deandra Dottin—the first woman to score a T20I century—had said about Mandhana not too long ago.
Building on this first impression has been a steady trickle of talented names. Sharma brought exceptional allround skills and verve, Shafali Verma stood out for her appetite for runs and Richa Ghosh for her glovework. Fast bowlers started emerging more frequently, and the standard of ground fielding too has improved by leaps and bounds. ODI or T20I, bowling, fielding or allround, you will now find at least one Indian—almost always Sharma—in the top-five on every ICC rankings now. It’s not a surprise, thus, that Rodrigues and Sharma were top picks in the overseas draft on Sunday.
Rodrigues more, purely because of her fearless shot-making that had impressed former Australia captain Meg Lanning back when she was only 17. “India have a few of those players coming through, which is really good,” Lanning had said during India’s tour in 2018, after Rodrigues had hit her maiden international fifty. “That’s just sort of the new nature of the women’s game. Those sort of players are going to thrive in the next few years.” For Rodrigues, now 23, to work on that promise and emerge as one of the harder-hitting generation of batters while breaking new barriers like the Caribbean Premier League speaks of the drive governing the mindset of younger players.
And it’s all coming nicely together to raise the level of experience as India still seek a maiden T20 World Cup title. “I love meeting new people and new cricketers and getting to know them, how their mind works and how to play in different conditions. Because every time you go play cricket, you don’t get the same kind of situation. Every time it changes,” Rodrigues was quoted as saying during this CPL. “The more you’re in that situation and in those pressure moments I think that’s the best preparation you can have.”
With a longer and more established history of white-ball cricket, Australian and English women’s cricketers still understandably dominate the professional players’ pool. And the only way to make it a more level-playing field is to play them more often. Which can only be possible if India’s women cricketers get more opportunities in overseas franchise leagues because the two-edition old Women’s Premier League still doesn’t have a quality pool of local talent. Till that happens, these pit stops of international franchise leagues should help Indian women’s cricket find its T20 groove.