Harmanpreet Kaur requires extra ladies’s Tests
India captain Harmanpreet Kaur has referred to as for extra ladies’s Tests in addition to a resumption of long-duration home cricket in India. Harmanpreet, 34, is broadly consultant of the top-level ladies’s cricketer of her time in what number of video games she’s performed in every of the three codecs: solely three Test matches to go together with 127 ODIs and 154 T20Is.
India are scheduled to play only two Test matches within the 2022-25 ladies’s Future Tours Programme (FTP) cycle, each at dwelling within the 2023-24 season, towards England and Australia. Only 4 groups will play Test cricket throughout this cycle, with India taking part in the fewest behind England (5), Australia (4) 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 stated whereas 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 12 months we’ve two Tests – one towards England and one towards Australia – and I hope these video games could make a big impact on ladies’s cricket and hopefully sooner or later we’ll preserve getting extra Test matches. We need to carry again Test matches in ladies’s cricket as a result of it is essential for girls’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 quite a bit,” she said. “Initially once I began taking part in, we hardly acquired home video games however for the final couple of years, home degree has improved quite a bit. We are getting extra video games and a few home video games are reside additionally, folks 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 is bettering day-to-day 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 beloved it again dwelling, we had an amazing expertise and hopefully subsequent 12 months we’ll get some extra younger expertise who can take this cricket increased.”
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 positively it is a little bit late, to be sincere, however one thing is best than nothing,” Harmanpreet said, when asked if it had taken too long for the WPL to get off the ground. “At least it began and began in such a means that everybody favored it. Maybe we have been a little bit scared, [wondering] what if folks will not prefer it, however the response we acquired for WPL, a few of the viewers, they have been extra inquisitive about ladies’s IPL than males’s as a result of it was one thing new to observe and so they actually favored it. Hopefully, after some years, we’ll add extra groups, extra gamers.”