Star Indian spinner wants to bowl for CSK as calls for women’s IPL grow
Indian women’s cricket team has been knocking on the doors of global glory over the past couple of years and challenging the dominance of Australia and England.
The Indian Premier League has given Indian cricketers a huge platform to showcase their talent at the highest level over the years. While men’s cricket has benefitted immensely from this, there have been talks in the past of creating a T20 league for women also, just like Australia and England have T20 leagues for women, which run parallel to the T20 blast and the Big Bash League.
Indian women’s cricket team has been knocking on the doors of global glory over the past couple of years and challenging the dominance of Australia and England. The team finished runners-up in the 2017 ICC World Cup and also in the 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup. These are all signs of the continuous growth of the women’s game in India and the stars on show want a bigger platform.
Poonam Yadav, the leg spinner who put on a brilliant show in the T20 World Cup recently, took to Twitter on Sunday and expressed her desire to bowl for the Chennai Super Kings. “Given a chance, would love to roll my arm over for @ChennaiIPL,” she wrote on Twitter along with using #WomensIPL. Chennai Super Kings retweeted Yadav’s message and wrote, “Lionesses are the real hunters! Vaa vaa Manjal malarey!”
Yadav ended the T20 World Cup as the joint second highest wicket taker with 10 scalps. With 95 wickets in 67 matches in her international T20 career, Yadav is sixth in the list of highest wicket-takers.
Top Indian stars like Harmapreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana play in the T20 leagues in England and Australia and have been stand out performers in the past. The BCCI has organised a T20 challenge for the women cricketers but it is a three-team affair and is a long way from a full fledged tournament.
Recently former Indian captain and a leading voice of the sport in India, Sunil Gavaskar, had requested BCCI president Sourav Ganguly to look into the possibility of organising a women’s IPL.
“As far as the BCCI is concerned, they are already doing a lot and which is the reason why this Indian women’s team has progressed so much. They went to Australia almost a month before the tournament started, and played a 3-match T20I series (tri-series) against the Australians,” Gavaskar told India Today.
“They did well over there. They were very well acclimated to the conditions and the pitches in Australia. So you have got to give credit to the BCCI for having done that,” he further added.
“To Sourav Ganguly and the BCCI, I would like to say, maybe next year, look at having a women’s IPL because that will unearth a lot more talent. There is already a lot of talent which we see and that will come to the fore with this performance of this Indian team throughout this tournament.
“The Australian cricket board has backed Australian women’s team for a long, long time. The Women’s Big Bash League has given plenty of opportunities to players, even our players. The likes of Smriti Mandhana, Harmanpreet they have played in the WBBL. That is the tournament where you get to play against the best players and learn from that,” the former India captain added.