Time for motion: The Gujarat Giants gamers having a exercise on the eve of the WPL opener towards Mumbai Indians.
| Photo Credit: Special association
Dusk on Saturday will see a new daybreak for women’s cricket.
The Women’s Premier League, the primary ball of which will probably be bowled on the D.Y. Patil Stadium right here at 7.30 p.m., is bound to alter the women’s recreation. Not simply in India, its ripples will probably be felt throughout the cricketing world.
Long within the making
Like what the IPL did for males’s cricket. If the IPL was the BCCI’s instantaneous response to the Indian Cricket League, which was threatening to play the function of disrupter, the WPL has been within the making for a very long time.
As precursor to the event, the Women’s T20 Challenge was performed in 2018 in Mumbai.
It was simply a one-match affair, with the BCCI placing collectively two groups comprising Indian and overseas gamers. Trailblazers have been led by Smriti Mandhana and Supernovas by Harmanpreet Kaur.
At the WPL, they’re the captains of Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians. Meg Lanning, Alyssa Healy and Beth Mooney have been among the many abroad gamers then.
The Aussie trio are main Delhi Capitals, UP Warriorz and Gujarat Giants. Fellow Australians Ellyse Perry and Meghan Schutt, together with New Zealand’s Sophie Devine, have been additionally there and are again for the WPL, too.
The T20 Challenge grew to a three-team event in 2019. Then issues lastly fell into place for the launch of the WPL, with the BCCI saying in late January the 5 franchises that gained bids to personal groups. The BCCI’s coffers turned richer by a staggering ₹4,700 crore. The media rights had already fetched ₹951 crore.
The auctions have been held at Mumbai three weeks in the past. Now the stage is about for what’s already the second-richest cricket league (after the IPL, after all). The BCCI might afford to smile.
Come a great distance
The smiles are broader on the faces of India’s girls cricketers, who had been the poor family for many years till the BCCI took them underneath its wing. They used to journey unreserved on trains, on bullock carts and tongas even, and stayed in dormitories.
Now they fly around the globe and verify into five-star accommodations.
Their mother and father are now not nervous about their complexions being ruined by enjoying within the solar.
By the time the curtains come down on the WPL on March 26, the variety of these mother and father may have elevated. That will make Indian women’s cricket stronger.
Today’s match: Gujarat Giants vs. Mumbai Indians, 7.30 p.m.
