Smriti Mandhana bats for six-team women’s IPL

By Team ISN August 19, 2021

India opener Smriti Mandhana immovably accepts that cricket in the nation has sufficient profundity for the presentation of a six-team women’s IPL, which can additionally help in further developing the bench strength for the national side.

The 25-year-old slick hitter said the nature of homegrown players has worked on in the men’s down since the coming of the Twenty20 group and the equivalent could be the situation for women’s cricket.

“There are same number of states for men and women. So, when they started men’s IPL, there were same number of states. But the quality went higher and higher as the years passed by,” Smriti Mandhana said on Ravichandran Ashwin’s YouTube channel.

“What IPL is today, it wasn’t the same 10 or 11 years back. I think it’s the same for women’s cricket. We have same amount of girls playing cricket. For now, I think we will have good five or six teams to start with and probably grow to eight teams in one or two years. But till the time we don’t start, we don’t know,” she added.

She feels the group could give women the right sort of openness that is needed to work on their game plan.

“Five-six teams, we are good to go with. But eight teams, I am still not sure how it will look like. But I think we really need to start with five or six teams so that we can actually get to eight teams very soon. I think till we don’t start, we are not giving exposure to our girls to turn their cricket into a really different level,” she said.

Smriti Mandhana said the women’s Big Bash League has prompted an improvement in the bench strength of the Australian team, something which can be repeated in India with the women’s IPL.

“I played in Big Bash four years back and now the quality is very different. You can see that in Cricket Australia where they have 40-50 cricketers ready to play international cricket any day. So, I really want that to happen in Indian cricket. I think IPL will play a huge role in that,” she said.

At present the BCCI has a Women’s T20 Challenge which highlights three teams – Trailblazers, Supernovas and Velocity.