This Indian women’s cricket team is skilled, but to become world-beaters, they need more than skill, they need commitment from the board.
Two parallel narratives have been doing the rounds since the Indian women’s team made a tearful exit at the semifinal stage of the recent World T20 Championship: One, that the star-studded team routinely punches below its weight, particularly in clutch situations, because their basics—fielding, catching, running between wickets—are below par, and two, that the Women’s Premier League, which has finally arrived to a fanfare of ‘Aali Re’ hoardings and full-page advertisements in the newspapers, is the panacea we have been waiting for.
No surprises there—we cricket fans like our post-mortems simple, solutions ditto. But for some reason, I found myself …
Prem Panicker has been a journalist for over 30 years. From daily newspapers to weekly magazines and digital news portals—he was one of the seven journalists who were part of the Rediff.com start-up team—he has written and edited features extensively across mediums and publications. Since quitting his job at Yahoo in 2014, he has been working as a freelance writer and editor, as well as teaching narrative journalism.
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