Mighty India’s stranglehold of cricket has began to maneuver past the lads’s sport as underlined by the profitable offers on the Women’s Premier League public sale.

A complete of 165 cricketers participated within the public sale on the weekend with Australian all-rounder Annabel Sutherland rising because the monetary winner after being snapped up for $240,000 by final season’s runners-up Delhi Capitals.

The 22-year-old Sutherland has had a quick begin to her profession and loved a robust marketing campaign within the current Women’s Big Bash League in Australia. She hails from a outstanding cricket household along with her father James Sutherland the long-standing former chief govt for Cricket Australia, whereas brother Will is a rising star in home cricket.

Sutherland was the equal most-expensive participant out of the 30 gamers purchased at alongside Indian all-rounder Kashvee Gautam, who will play for the Gujarat Giants.

Former Australia captain Meg Lanning together with compatriots Jess Jonassen and Laura Harris have been retained by Delhi previous to the public sale.

The second version of the WPL might be held within the backend of February and just like the inaugural season is ready to be solely performed in a single metropolis. There had been hypothesis that the occasion can be held in several cities very like the lads’s Indian Premier League.

“As far as the venue is concerned, it will be held in one state only so that it is better logistically – what if we do not get two venues in one city, that is,” Indian cricket boss Jay Shah mentioned. “Logistics are crucial for us this time, subsequent time we are able to determine it out.”

India, the world’s most populous nation, has change into the British sport of cricket’s heartland and its governing physique guidelines with an iron fist. It is instructive that Shah holds appreciable affect on the International Cricket Council board and he was additionally shoehorned into the working group tasked with getting cricket into the Los Angeles Olympics.

India has firmly grabbed the reins of cricket from conventional powers England and Australia, however they’ve been significantly slower growing ladies’s cricket. They made a belated push in 2018 by launching a three-team Women’s T20 Challenge staged alongside the money-spinning IPL.

A game-changing second was the ladies’s T20 World Cup in 2020 when India and Australia contested the final in entrance of 86,000 followers on the well-known Melbourne Cricket Ground – simply days earlier than Covid-19 shut down on a regular basis life.

It was most likely there after which when Shah and India’s resolution makers realized that the ladies’s sport was an untapped goldmine. The WPL has since been concocted and hailed as a game-changer for ladies’s cricket with high gamers incomes $400,000 for a event, which lasted simply three weeks in its first version performed in March earlier this 12 months.

Serious funding has been put into the WPL, whose 5 groups fetched $572 million on the again of Viacom 18 forking out $116 million for the media rights for the subsequent 5 years. The worth per-game is round $1 million.

Much just like the IPL, the place cricket among the many main nations successfully shuts down, the WPL will lead to worldwide cricket being largely on hiatus throughout this era as gamers eye main paycheques.

The WPL captured the creativeness of native and worldwide followers within the first version with India’s hero Harmanpreet Kaur main Mumbai, sporting their eye-catching blue kits, to the championship amid a febrile ambiance.

The second version is hoped to construct on the muse that has been put in place. “It might be extra profitable this time,” Shah mentioned.

And the Indian cricket chief often leaves no stone unturned to fulfil his prophecies.

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