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India’s captain also wants red-ball matches to return to domestic cricket
Harmanpreet Kaur has only played three Test matches so far • Getty Images
India captain Harmanpreet Kaur has called for more women’s Tests as well as a resumption of long-duration domestic cricket in India. Harmanpreet, 34, is broadly representative of the top-level women’s cricketer of her time in how many games she’s played in each of the three formats: only three Test matches to go with 127 ODIs and 154 T20Is.
India are scheduled to play only two Test matches in the 2022-25 women’s Future Tours Programme (FTP) cycle, both at home in the 2023-24 season, against England and Australia. Only four teams will play Test cricket during this cycle, with India playing the fewest behind England (five), Australia (four) and South Africa (three).
“As a player, I definitely want more Tests because as a growing kid, we saw more Tests on TV than T20s,” Harmanpreet said while interviewed on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast. “Nowadays it’s a lot of fun playing T20s but Test cricket is something every cricketer wants to play.
“This year we have two Tests – one against England and one against Australia – and I hope those games can make a huge impact on women’s cricket and hopefully in the future we will keep getting more Test matches. We have to bring back Test matches in women’s cricket because it’s very important for women’s cricket.”
The last time there was multi-day domestic women’s cricket in India was in 2017-18, when the BCCI conducted an inter-zonal three-day tournament as well as an inter-zonal Under-19 two-day tournament. While Harmanpreet is happy with how far domestic women’s cricket has come since her early years, particularly with the start of the Women’s Premier League (WPL), she hopes long-duration cricket will resume soon.
“Trust me, [domestic cricket] has improved a lot,” she said. “Initially when I started playing, we hardly got domestic games but for the last couple of years, domestic level has improved a lot. We are getting more games and some domestic games are live also, people can watch on TV.
“It is improving day by day but in my early days we used to play two- and three-day games which we are really missing, and I’m sure after these two Test matches hopefully we’ll get two-day matches back. The more cricket we get, the more improvement we’ll see in women’s cricket.
“Definitely it’s improving day by day and [I] hope to see some more talent in the Indian side. As you mentioned WPL was a game-changing moment for us, the tournament was so good, everyone loved it back home, we had a great experience and hopefully next year we’ll get some more young talent who can take this cricket higher.”
After years of players voicing their desire for a women’s franchise T20 tournament along the lines of the IPL, the WPL got underway in 2023, with the Harmanpreet-led Mumbai Indians winning the title.
“Yes definitely it’s a little late, to be honest, but something is better than nothing,” Harmanpreet said, when asked if it had taken too long for the WPL to get off the ground. “At least it started and started in such a way that everyone liked it. Maybe we were a little scared, [wondering] what if people won’t like it, but the response we got for WPL, some of the audience, they were more interested in women’s IPL than men’s because it was something new to watch and they really liked it. Hopefully, after some years, we’ll add more teams, more players.”
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