India captain Harmanpreet Kaur calls for more Test matches in women's cricket
Aug 08, 2023
New Delhi [India], August 8 : India captain Harmanpreet Kaur has called for more women's Tests as well as the revival of long-duration domestic cricket in India.
The 34-year-old captain in terms of how many games she's played in each of the three formats, she's roughly reflective of the top-level women's cricketer of her era: only three Test matches, 127 ODIs, and 154 T20Is.
India captain also wants red-ball matches to return to domestic cricket.
In the 2022-25 women's Future Tours Programme (FTP) cycle, India is slated to play only two Test matches, both at home in the 2023-24 season, against England and Australia. During this cycle, only four sides will play Test cricket, with India playing the fewest, trailing 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. Nowadays it's a lot of fun playing T20s but Test cricket is something every cricketer wants to play," Harmanpreet said while interviewed on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast.
"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," she added.
The last multi-day domestic women's cricket competition in India was in 2017-18, when the BCCI held an inter-zonal three-day tournament as well as an inter-zonal Under-19 two-day event. While Harmanpreet is pleased with how far domestic women's cricket has progressed since her childhood, notably with the introduction of the Women's Premier League (WPL), she hopes long-duration games will resume soon.
"Trust me, [domestic cricket] has improved a lot. Initially, when I started playing, we hardly got domestic games but for the last couple of years, the domestic level has improved a lot. We are getting more games and some domestic games are live also, people can watch on TV," she said.
"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," said the India captain.
"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," she added.
