On the eve of Saturday’s Weber WBBL Sydney derby, Smriti Mandhana and Shafali Verma, two vital figures in Indian cricket's future, know exactly where they stand.
Mandhana laughs, “we might do some sledging in Hindi, so nobody understands”.
Verma is on the same wavelength as her mentor. “I want to get her ... and sledging her, it will be good”, she remarked.
Deepti Sharma and Mandhana, whose recent 127 set a new record for the highest women’s Test score by a foreign player in Australia, are leading the Sydney Thunder's title defence this summer.
Both Verma and Radha Yadav, the prodigy who broke Sachin Tendulkar's record by being the youngest Indian to score a half-century in international cricket, are on the books of the Sydney Sixers.
Verma’s account of being rejected by Rohtak youth academies because of her gender and then winning “man of the series” in a match after cutting her hair and pretending to be a boy is both remarkable and indicative.
In India, women’s cricket has not received the same level of institutional or ideological support as Australia's recent march toward professionalism.
Despite this, the team held its own in a recent multi-format series in Queensland, breaking Australia’s 26-match ODI winning streak, and was the only team to beat Australia at the T20 World Cup last year.
There is a sense that India has all the makings of a juggernaut as young people acquire more exposure to competitions like the WBBL and fewer players are lost due to archaic gender standards.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is the key, as it is so often in this sport.
If the BCCI, which agreed this year to arrange only the second Australia-India women's Test since 1991, were to press for more matches and allocate more resources, it would almost certainly have a seismic impact on the game.
Such debate usually centres on launching a women's edition of the Indian Premier League, the BCCI’s colossal money-spinner that has also done wonders for Virat Kohli’s team's depth and confidence.
In 2018, the BCCI debuted an annual women's T20 exhibition series to coincide with the IPL, however it was postponed this year due to COVID-19.
Mandhana said, “Hopefully we can have a women's IPL as soon as possible. It's obviously whenever the BCCI decides. But it will help the Indian team to win more matches, for sure”.
