Smriti Mandhana tops girls’s T20 league public sale with Rs 3.4 cr

IT WAS a day when cricket turned as a lot a profitable profession possibility for girls as it’s for males world wide. Monday’s participant public sale for the T20 Women’s Premier League (WPL) made prime girls cricketers millionaires in a single day and introduced hope for these on the perimeter.

India’s left-handed opener Smriti Mandhana attracted the very best profitable bid — Rs 3.4 crore — an quantity larger than what was paid by IPL franchises for elite males’s cricketers like Ajinkya Rahane, Bangladesh’s Shakib Al Hasan, England’s Adil Rashid and Australia’s Adam Zampa.

Mandhana later put the importance of the day in perspective. “Over the last 10 years, we have been watching auctions for men… It’s such a big movement for women’s cricket. I think this is history. I think the whole thing is exciting and I am saying it’s an exciting time ahead,” she stated.

India captain Harmanpreet Kaur went for Rs 1.8 crore, whereas worldwide stars reminiscent of Australians Ashleigh Gardner (Rs 3.2 crore), Ellyse Perry (Rs 1.7 crore), Beth Mooney (Rs 2 crore) and Meg Lanning (Rs 1.1 crore), and England’s Natalie Sciver-Brunt (Rs 3.2 crore), additionally went for large quantities.

There was a windfall in retailer, too, for Shafali Verma (Rs 2 crore), the captain of India’s victorious U-19 World Cup aspect, Jemimah Rodrigues (Rs 2.2 crore) and Richa Ghosh (Rs 1.9 crore).

For a number of of them, this was a reward for the hardship they endured to achieve this stage.

In 2013, Richa’s father needed to take out a mortgage to purchase her a bat earlier than her U-19 trials. “Money was an issue. I didn’t know anyone in Kolkata, so I used to look for cheaper hotels where we would stay. Our daily routine was to leave the hotel at 7 am and come back in the evening. The ground was our home in Kolkata,” Richa’s father, Manabendra Ghosh, stated.

Meanwhile, India pacer Pooja Vastrakar’s father has already put in place plans for the Rs 1.9 crore his daughter earned on the public sale. Before leaving for the continued World T20 in South Africa, Pooja had purchased him a Rs 15-lakh automobile. The 72-year-old wasn’t too happy. “She wastes a lot of money. I want her to open a fixed deposit account with all the money,” Bandhan Ram stated from Shahdol in West Bengal.

India was by no means considered wanting expertise in girls’s cricket, but it surely wanted a stage just like the WPL to broaden the expertise base and switch the nation right into a powerhouse. The current Under-19 World Cup title has supplied a peek into what is feasible, and the WPL with its monetary windfall is probably going to provide one other shot within the arm to the method.

And though there are home leagues in different international locations — just like the Big Bash League in Australia and The Hundred in England — a full-fledged girls’s league in India was at all times thought-about to be a game-changer. The 5 WPL franchises had been purchased for a complete of Rs 466.9 crore and the tv rights had been offered for Rs 951 crore in a five-year deal. Only America’s basketball and soccer leagues for girls have larger broadcast offers.

The IPL, which has been working for the final 15 years, is essentially the most high-profile and profitable home league on the planet with a window created particularly for it within the worldwide calendar. It is the yardstick with which each and every different league world wide measures itself, although the competition is just for second place. The WPL, too, is predicted to have the identical standing in girls’s cricket.

Most of the entities which have thrown their hat within the WPL ring personal corresponding IPL groups as effectively, so will generate synergy and produce very important technical, managerial and monetary knowhow to the ladies’s sport. It will solely profit the WPL groups and gamers.