India captain Harmanpreet Kaur requires extra girls’s Assessments

India captain Harmanpreet Kaur has referred to as for extra girls’s Assessments in addition to a resumption of long-duration home cricket in India. Harmanpreet, 34, is broadly consultant of the top-level girls’s cricketer of her time in what number of video games she’s performed in every of the three codecs: solely three Take a look at matches to go along with 127 ODIs and 154 T20Is.India are scheduled to play solely two Take a look at matches within the 2022-25 girls’s Future Excursions Programme (FTP) cycle, each at residence within the 2023-24 season, towards England and Australia. Solely 4 groups will play Take a look at cricket throughout this cycle, with India taking part in the fewest behind England (5), Australia (4) and South Africa (three).

“As a participant, I undoubtedly need extra Assessments as a result of as a rising child, we noticed extra Assessments on TV than T20s,” Harmanpreet mentioned whereas interviewed on the Sky Sports activities Cricket Podcast. “These days it is lots of enjoyable taking part in T20s however Take a look at cricket is one thing each cricketer desires to play.

“This 12 months we’ve two Assessments – one towards England and one towards Australia – and I hope these video games could make a huge effect on girls’s cricket and hopefully sooner or later we’ll hold getting extra Take a look at matches. Now we have to convey again Take a look at matches in girls’s cricket as a result of it is essential for ladies’s cricket.”

The final time there was multi-day home girls’s cricket in India was in 2017-18, when the BCCI performed an inter-zonal three-day event in addition to an inter-zonal Below-19 two-day event. Whereas Harmanpreet is pleased with how far home girls’s cricket has come since her early years, significantly with the beginning of the Ladies’s Premier League (WPL), she hopes long-duration cricket will resume quickly.

“Belief me, [domestic cricket] has improved so much,” she mentioned. “Initially once I began taking part in, we hardly bought home video games however for the final couple of years, home degree has improved so much. We’re getting extra video games and a few home video games are reside additionally, folks can watch on TV.

“It’s enhancing daily however in my early days we used to play two- and three-day video games which we’re actually lacking, and I am positive after these two Take a look at matches hopefully we’ll get two-day matches again. The extra cricket we get, the extra enchancment we’ll see in girls’s cricket.

“Positively it is enhancing daily and [I] hope to see some extra expertise within the Indian facet. As you talked about WPL was a game-changing second for us, the event was so good, everybody cherished it again residence, we had an awesome expertise and hopefully subsequent 12 months we’ll get some extra younger expertise who can take this cricket increased.”

After years of gamers voicing their want for a girls’s franchise T20 event alongside the traces of the IPL, the WPL bought underway in 2023, with the Harmanpreet-led Mumbai Indians successful the title.

“Sure undoubtedly it is a little bit late, to be sincere, however one thing is healthier than nothing,” Harmanpreet mentioned, when requested if it had taken too lengthy for the WPL to get off the bottom. “No less than it began and began in such a means that everybody preferred it. Perhaps we have been a little bit scared, [wondering] what if folks will not prefer it, however the response we bought for WPL, among the viewers, they have been extra considering girls’s IPL than males’s as a result of it was one thing new to look at and so they actually preferred it. Hopefully, after some years, we’ll add extra groups, extra gamers.”