The Women's Ipl

The second edition of the Women's Indian Premier League (WIPL) came to a close last weekend with a nail-biting finish with Supernovas ekeing out a victory in the last ball. The Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur was packed with a 13,000 crowd and the match was telecasted live over the Star Network in India. However, the turf wasn't so green always. When the IPL started out in 2018, the women's game wasn't known to even a sports aficionado. Naturally, a tournament for the women didn't pop up till many seasons later. In fact, the 1st edition of the WIPL was held after IPL completed a decade, in 2018 when a one-off match was held on 22nd May.

However, to say that the women's game always followed the men's would be scandalous, for the first ever Cricket World Cup was held for women in 1975. From there, the attention for the women's game spiralled down while the men's game was popularised by the newly independent British colonies.

So, when Cricket Australia announced a Big Bash for the women in 20, it was a giant leap for the women's game. The following year, the BCCI granted Indian players permission to play in the Big Bash. Many Indian players — Mithali Raj, Harmanpreet kaur, Veda Krishnamurthy — made their mark in the tournament prompting the BCCI to think about conducting something similar. The reasons behind not conducting the WIPL before were the dearth of a sufficiently large talent pool to group into teams. The lack of talent pool could lead to matches going off the sporting radar and ultimately even scrapped off. So, they waited for a decade and now, we have a WIPL.

This year's WIPL proved that there exists a fairly good talent pool and it can unearth talent. The three teams that played — Velocity, Supernovas and Trailblazers — all had 12 quality players, mostly internationals in their squad. The IPL might boast of a 25 member squad but we should remember that this is only the 2nd edition. The teams, however, do not have a good fan base in the IPL but those come only with a legacy and 2 years isn't time enough.

The quality of the games was good — though the fielding was off-target at times. In the end, all the teams finished equals with 2 points each in the points table and the final winner Supernovas having been defeated by the Trailblazers in the opening match.

So, when the little known Radha Yadav scored 8 runs off the last 3 balls, it signified an era of women's game taken to another level. While Supernovas were expected to win the match easily at the beginning of the game, Velocity put up a good fight — with the bat by Sushma Verma and Amelia Kerr and with the ball by Devika Vaidya and Jahanara Alam. In the end, it boiled down to a thrilling last ball finish with fans crossing their fingers. The game still has a long way to go before it can equal the men's, but certainly this is a step in the towards it.