Published - | Updated - February 13, 2023 09:40 am
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With the Women’s Premier League’s debut auction taking place on Monday, February 13, the pivotal moment that Indian women’s cricket has long awaited has finally come. Along with Aakash Chopra and Abhinav Mukund, England great Lydia Greenway and Indian native Veda Krishnamurthy will make up Viacom18’s expert panel, which will provide viewers with thorough and depth coverage of the auction on Sports18 & JioCinema.
It’s interesting to see that Krishnamurthy is one of the 409 players in the auction pool. When host Anant Tyagi questioned her about her chances of selection at the WPL auction preview programme, which is presently streaming on JioCinema, she was all smiles.
“I’m quite happy. My teammates from Karnataka think I’m insane for conducting a concert while my name is up for auction.But I’ve dealt with that without incident. I don’t know if that will happen or not, but I am quite enthusiastic,” the 30-year-old India hitter remarked.
The five franchises will select the top players in international women’s cricket from squads of 15 to 18 players from a pot of Rs 12 crore apiece.
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While international players like Alyssa Healy, Ellyse Perry, Meg Lanning, Sophie Devine, and Sophie Ecclestone will be in high demand, Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur’s career will be eagerly watched.
“The first person every franchise will identify is their captain, given the enormous importance of the position in T20 cricket and the intriguingThe trouble is, you can’t single out just one player. You might want Smriti, Harmanpreet, or Dipti (Sharma) to be your captain, but if another franchise makes a successful bid for them, you might not have that option,” said Chopra.
“But the reconnaissance was already completed. For the last four months, Bangalore had been searching for players. Jhulan (Goswami) plays for one team, Mithali (Raj) for another. To put together a strong team, there is undoubtedly a lot of intellectual trust at work, he continued. Teams will have to choose how much they want to spend on their captain in light of the 12-crore purse. It will be intriguing to witness that, so,” said Krishnamurthy.
The key is to be extremely flexible if any franchise decides to spend a lot of money ona few players who other teams would have chosen as captains. That is why watching auctions is so fascinating, said Chopra.
Mandhana is an opener who can take the game away and who teams will be ready to spend a fortune on, according to Krishnamurthy. She is also captaincy material, so it goes without saying that whichever team she joins, she will be the captain. She adds a lot of running experience to that franchisee. She is young, thus she will likely remain with that franchise for a while. All franchises would be on the lookout for that.
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