Let’s face it. Our <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/richa-chadhas-video-for-the-india-womens-team-nails-it/">Women in Blue</a></strong> deserve as much praise as our Men in Blue. Be it the appreciation, the monetary reward, the limelight, media coverage and viewership. The blame is not entirely upon us as the audience to not be able to provide the women with the same love as we give to our Men’s team because we have been fed with notions that cricket is a gentleman’s game, not one for the ladies.

Even for bare minimum knowledge, the majority only knows two or three names from our Women’s team at max- Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur.

But guess what? The Indian Women’s Cricket Team is defying all odds, and it doesn’t matter if ICC and broadcast television networks do not give Smriti Mandhana’s century the platform because they are okay with the audience watching old highlights of matches of the Men’s team.

That’s what has to change, we’ve gotta show these broadcasters and Cricket authorities that we are interested in what the women in the game do. And the first step should be to know a little about our players, those players that are not frequent names in the mainstream world.

Here&#8217;s all you need to know about these 5 Indian women cricketers

<a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158156" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg" alt="Smriti Mandhana India" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158156" class="wp-caption-text">Smriti Mandhana celebrates her century. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption>

Now a lot of us may know <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/i-had-scolded-smriti-mandhana-for-copying-sangakkara-in-the-nets-says-her-coach/">Smriti Mandhana</a></strong> because she is known as that player who guided the team with two back to back victories with match-winning knocks, a 90 against England and a scintillating century in the next game against the West Indies. But even in her initial playing days, she was a star.

Born in a family in which cricket is in the blood, she got her first call up, for the Maharashtra U-15 team when she was nine and just two years later, she made it to the U-19 squad. She engraved her name in the record books as she became the first Indian women cricketer to score a double century in s one-day game.

She smacked 224 off 150 balls in the West Zone Under-19 Tournament, at the Alambic Cricket Ground in Vadodara while playing for Maharashtra against Gujarat. She was also one of the two Indian players to be signed up by the Big Bash League.

She made her international debut in 2013, and the way has only been up since then. In 25 innings that she has played, Mandhana has scored 897 runs with the best score of 106* at an average of 37.37 which included two hundreds and six half-centuries. She was also the only Indian to be picked by ICC in its first ever ODI team of the year for 2016.

<a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Deepti-Sharma.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158676" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Deepti-Sharma.jpg" alt="Deepti Sharma" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158676" class="wp-caption-text">Deepti Sharma. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption>

If you spot a 19-year-old livewire on the field, sporting a boy cut and energetic as ever, know that it is Deepti Sharma. “As an offspinner, opening left-handed bat, and an agile fielder in any position, India have an unbeatable combination in her,” said former all-rounder and coach Purnima Rau about Deepti, once.

She holds the record of scoring 188, the second-highest score in women&#8217;s ODIs and the record of being the youngest Indian, male or female, to take a five-wicket haul, with match-winning returns of 6 for 20 helped India complete a clean sweep over Sri Lanka. And, she’s still a teenager. Let that sink in.

Always ready to bring her A-game to the table, she willingly decided to mould herself from a natural right-hander to a left-handed grip, without any tutoring. She also switched from medium pace bowling to off-spin because it was pointed out that her action was more suited to that.

Suresh Raina is her favorite. If you saw her taking the return catch to dismiss Danielle Wyatt in the game against England in the ongoing World Cup, you would know that not only does she want to replicate his inside-out shot for six, she successfully matched his reflexes too.

<a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Shikha-Pandey.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158677" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Shikha-Pandey.jpg" alt="Shikha Pandey" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158677" class="wp-caption-text">India bowler Shikha Pandey. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption>

Fl Lt Shikha Pandey, Jersey Number 12 of Indian Women Cricket Team and an officer in the Indian Air Force is the right way to address her. She is a right-arm medium pacer and a middle-order batter in the team, Shikha is the first woman cricketer from Goa and only the second player, male or female, from Goa, to play in the Indian national team.

She made her international T20 debut against Bangladesh at Cox’s Bazar cricket stadium in 2014. Her ODI and Test debut followed in the next month in England. Shikha, in her summer vacation, would spend her time watching cricket matches and bowling against a wall, imitating the actions of various international bowlers, her best impersonation being that of Daniel Vettori.

“Hitting the winning runs together with Mithali Raj against England in one of the tests that we played at Wormsley, England, in August, was an amazing experience. Also, my five-wicket haul against Haryana in the one-day tournament and a 56 ball 73 against Jharkhand in the T-20 tournament are some of the moments I’ll always cherish,” she said about her favourite moments.

<a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2016/03/Ekta-Bisht.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-58041" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Ekta-Bisht.jpg" alt="Ekta Bisht" width="600" height="469" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-58041" class="wp-caption-text">Ekta Bisht of India. (Photo by Christopher Lee-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)</figcaption>

It is said that Ekta Bisht has what it takes to be in the league of women who are considered the best spin bowlers India has produced. She hails from Almora, Uttarakhand, and is the only cricketer from that state to play for India. She made her debut in 2011 and has more than a hundred international wickets across both ODIs and T20s.

She is the team’s best spinner and is often the captain’s go-to bowler when the pace bowlers are expensive. Her game in the ICC Women World Cup qualifier helped the team thrashed Pakistan by seven wickets. Her haul is the fourth best by an Indian bowler in ODIs. In the match, she bowled a total of seven maidens, the joint-most by any Indian bowler in the ODIs. She is the only Indian woman to claim a T20 hat-trick, that came up against Sri Lanka in the 2012 World T20.

If there’s even slight assistance from the pitch, expect Bisht to spin a web for the opposition. More so, because she’s brilliant when field restrictions are in place. Since February 2016, her bowling average has been 16.53 at an economy rate of 2.93.

<a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Punam-Raut.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158678" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Punam-Raut.jpg" alt="Punam Raut" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158678" class="wp-caption-text">India batsman Poonam Raut. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption>

She was the winner of BCCI’s best junior cricketer award in 2011 and this World Cup, is her fifth World Cup overall, in addition to two T20 World Cups. She made her International debut in 2009 and it was in a World Cup where she played just one game. Despite promising performances, her journey with the Indian cricket team has been a roller coaster ride, because she was not able to make the opening spot her own on the back of few odd good innings.

She was out of the team, but her comeback has been inspirational. Raut plays for Indian Railways and lost her place in the Indian team that toured West Indies and the World Cup qualifiers in Sri Lanka. With help from senior team-mate, Jhulan Goswami, coach Sanjay Gaitonde and former India wicket-keeper Chandrakant Pandit helped her iron out her flaws, leading to her comeback.

Gaitonde and Pandit worked towards changing her grip and back lift which made a considerable difference in her batting. &#8220;My grip was predominantly bottom handed. They told me to use my top hand more on my shots. I faced around 300 throw downs daily and ultimately it helped me play those long shots and I could clear the ropes easily,&#8221; told Mid-Day before leaving for the marquee event.

She scored a brilliant 86 in the first match against England, and was dismissed for a duck in the next match against the Windies but don’t rule her out yet. She is the queen of comebacks.

<p>Let’s face it. Our <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/richa-chadhas-video-for-the-india-womens-team-nails-it/">Women in Blue</a></strong> deserve as much praise as our Men in Blue. Be it the appreciation, the monetary reward, the limelight, media coverage and viewership. The blame is not entirely upon us as the audience to not be able to provide the women with the same love as we give to our Men’s team because we have been fed with notions that cricket is a gentleman’s game, not one for the ladies.</p>
<p>Even for bare minimum knowledge, the majority only knows two or three names from our Women’s team at max- Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur.</p>
<p>But guess what? The Indian Women’s Cricket Team is defying all odds, and it doesn’t matter if ICC and broadcast television networks do not give Smriti Mandhana’s century the platform because they are okay with the audience watching old highlights of matches of the Men’s team.</p>
<p>That’s what has to change, we’ve gotta show these broadcasters and Cricket authorities that we are interested in what the women in the game do. And the first step should be to know a little about our players, those players that are not frequent names in the mainstream world.</p>
<h3>Here’s all you need to know about these 5 Indian women cricketers</h3>
<h3>#1 Smriti Mandhana</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158156" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158156" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg"><amp-img class="size-full wp-image-158156" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg" alt="Smriti Mandhana India" width="640" height="400" layout="responsive" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"></amp-img></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158156" class="wp-caption-text">Smriti Mandhana celebrates her century. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Now a lot of us may know <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/i-had-scolded-smriti-mandhana-for-copying-sangakkara-in-the-nets-says-her-coach/">Smriti Mandhana</a></strong> because she is known as that player who guided the team with two back to back victories with match-winning knocks, a 90 against England and a scintillating century in the next game against the West Indies. But even in her initial playing days, she was a star.</p>
<p>Born in a family in which cricket is in the blood, she got her first call up, for the Maharashtra U-15 team when she was nine and just two years later, she made it to the U-19 squad. She engraved her name in the record books as she became the first Indian women cricketer to score a double century in s one-day game.</p>
<p>She smacked 224 off 150 balls in the West Zone Under-19 Tournament, at the Alambic Cricket Ground in Vadodara while playing for Maharashtra against Gujarat. She was also one of the two Indian players to be signed up by the Big Bash League.</p>
<p>She made her international debut in 2013, and the way has only been up since then. In 25 innings that she has played, Mandhana has scored 897 runs with the best score of 106* at an average of 37.37 which included two hundreds and six half-centuries. She was also the only Indian to be picked by ICC in its first ever ODI team of the year for 2016.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#2 Deepti Sharma</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158676" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158676" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Deepti-Sharma.jpg"><amp-img class="size-full wp-image-158676" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Deepti-Sharma.jpg" alt="Deepti Sharma" width="640" height="400" layout="responsive" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"></amp-img></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158676" class="wp-caption-text">Deepti Sharma. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>If you spot a 19-year-old livewire on the field, sporting a boy cut and energetic as ever, know that it is Deepti Sharma. “As an offspinner, opening left-handed bat, and an agile fielder in any position, India have an unbeatable combination in her,” said former all-rounder and coach Purnima Rau about Deepti, once.</p>
<p>She holds the record of scoring 188, the second-highest score in women’s ODIs and the record of being the youngest Indian, male or female, to take a five-wicket haul, with match-winning returns of 6 for 20 helped India complete a clean sweep over Sri Lanka. And, she’s still a teenager. Let that sink in.</p>
<p>Always ready to bring her A-game to the table, she willingly decided to mould herself from a natural right-hander to a left-handed grip, without any tutoring. She also switched from medium pace bowling to off-spin because it was pointed out that her action was more suited to that.</p>
<p>Suresh Raina is her favorite. If you saw her taking the return catch to dismiss Danielle Wyatt in the game against England in the ongoing World Cup, you would know that not only does she want to replicate his inside-out shot for six, she successfully matched his reflexes too.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#3 Shikha Pandey</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158677" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158677" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Shikha-Pandey.jpg"><amp-img class="size-full wp-image-158677" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Shikha-Pandey.jpg" alt="Shikha Pandey" width="640" height="400" layout="responsive" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"></amp-img></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158677" class="wp-caption-text">India bowler Shikha Pandey. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Fl Lt Shikha Pandey, Jersey Number 12 of Indian Women Cricket Team and an officer in the Indian Air Force is the right way to address her. She is a right-arm medium pacer and a middle-order batter in the team, Shikha is the first woman cricketer from Goa and only the second player, male or female, from Goa, to play in the Indian national team.</p>
<p>She made her international T20 debut against Bangladesh at Cox’s Bazar cricket stadium in 2014. Her ODI and Test debut followed in the next month in England. Shikha, in her summer vacation, would spend her time watching cricket matches and bowling against a wall, imitating the actions of various international bowlers, her best impersonation being that of Daniel Vettori.</p>
<p>“Hitting the winning runs together with Mithali Raj against England in one of the tests that we played at Wormsley, England, in August, was an amazing experience. Also, my five-wicket haul against Haryana in the one-day tournament and a 56 ball 73 against Jharkhand in the T-20 tournament are some of the moments I’ll always cherish,” she said about her favourite moments.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#4 Ekta Bisht</h3>
<figure id="attachment_58041" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-58041" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2016/03/Ekta-Bisht.jpg"><amp-img class="size-full wp-image-58041" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Ekta-Bisht.jpg" alt="Ekta Bisht" width="600" height="469" layout="responsive" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"></amp-img></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-58041" class="wp-caption-text">Ekta Bisht of India. (Photo by Christopher Lee-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>It is said that Ekta Bisht has what it takes to be in the league of women who are considered the best spin bowlers India has produced. She hails from Almora, Uttarakhand, and is the only cricketer from that state to play for India. She made her debut in 2011 and has more than a hundred international wickets across both ODIs and T20s.</p>
<p>She is the team’s best spinner and is often the captain’s go-to bowler&nbsp;when the pace bowlers are expensive. Her game in the ICC Women World Cup qualifier helped the team thrashed Pakistan by seven wickets. Her haul is the fourth best by an Indian bowler in ODIs. In the match, she bowled a total of seven maidens, the joint-most by any Indian bowler in the ODIs. She is the only Indian woman to claim a T20 hat-trick, that came up against Sri Lanka in the 2012 World T20.</p>
<p>If there’s even slight assistance from the pitch, expect Bisht to spin a web for the opposition. More so, because she’s brilliant when field restrictions are in place. Since February 2016, her bowling average has been 16.53 at an economy rate of 2.93.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#5 Punam Raut</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158678" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158678" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Punam-Raut.jpg"><amp-img class="size-full wp-image-158678" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Punam-Raut.jpg" alt="Punam Raut" width="640" height="400" layout="responsive" style="max-width: 100%; margin: 0;"></amp-img></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158678" class="wp-caption-text">India batsman Poonam Raut. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>She was the winner of&nbsp;BCCI’s best junior cricketer award in 2011 and this World Cup, is her fifth World Cup overall, in addition to two T20 World Cups. She made her International debut in 2009 and it was in a World Cup where she played just one game. Despite promising performances, her journey with the Indian cricket team has been a roller coaster ride, because she was not able to make the opening spot her own on the back of few odd good innings.</p>
<p>She was out of the team, but her comeback has been inspirational. Raut plays for Indian Railways and lost her place in the Indian team that toured West Indies and the World Cup qualifiers in Sri Lanka. With help from senior team-mate, Jhulan Goswami, coach Sanjay Gaitonde and former India wicket-keeper Chandrakant Pandit helped her iron out her flaws, leading to her comeback.</p>
<p>Gaitonde and Pandit worked towards changing her grip and back lift which made a considerable difference in her batting. “My grip was predominantly bottom handed. They told me to use my top hand more on my shots. I faced around 300 throw downs daily and ultimately it helped me play those long shots and I could clear the ropes easily,” told Mid-Day before leaving for the marquee event.</p>
<p>She scored a brilliant 86 in the first match against England, and was dismissed for a duck in the next match against the Windies but don’t rule her out yet. She is the queen of comebacks.</p>

<p>Let’s face it. Our <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/richa-chadhas-video-for-the-india-womens-team-nails-it/">Women in Blue</a></strong> deserve as much praise as our Men in Blue. Be it the appreciation, the monetary reward, the limelight, media coverage and viewership. The blame is not entirely upon us as the audience to not be able to provide the women with the same love as we give to our Men’s team because we have been fed with notions that cricket is a gentleman’s game, not one for the ladies.</p>
<p>Even for bare minimum knowledge, the majority only knows two or three names from our Women’s team at max- Mithali Raj, Jhulan Goswami, Harmanpreet Kaur.</p>
<p>But guess what? The Indian Women’s Cricket Team is defying all odds, and it doesn’t matter if ICC and broadcast television networks do not give Smriti Mandhana’s century the platform because they are okay with the audience watching old highlights of matches of the Men’s team.</p>
<p>That’s what has to change, we’ve gotta show these broadcasters and Cricket authorities that we are interested in what the women in the game do. And the first step should be to know a little about our players, those players that are not frequent names in the mainstream world.</p>
<h3>Here&#8217;s all you need to know about these 5 Indian women cricketers</h3>
<h3>#1 Smriti Mandhana</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158156" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158156" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158156" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Smriti-Mandhana-India.jpg" alt="Smriti Mandhana India" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158156" class="wp-caption-text">Smriti Mandhana celebrates her century. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Now a lot of us may know <strong><a href="https://www.crictracker.com/i-had-scolded-smriti-mandhana-for-copying-sangakkara-in-the-nets-says-her-coach/">Smriti Mandhana</a></strong> because she is known as that player who guided the team with two back to back victories with match-winning knocks, a 90 against England and a scintillating century in the next game against the West Indies. But even in her initial playing days, she was a star.</p>
<p>Born in a family in which cricket is in the blood, she got her first call up, for the Maharashtra U-15 team when she was nine and just two years later, she made it to the U-19 squad. She engraved her name in the record books as she became the first Indian women cricketer to score a double century in s one-day game.</p>
<p>She smacked 224 off 150 balls in the West Zone Under-19 Tournament, at the Alambic Cricket Ground in Vadodara while playing for Maharashtra against Gujarat. She was also one of the two Indian players to be signed up by the Big Bash League.</p>
<p>She made her international debut in 2013, and the way has only been up since then. In 25 innings that she has played, Mandhana has scored 897 runs with the best score of 106* at an average of 37.37 which included two hundreds and six half-centuries. She was also the only Indian to be picked by ICC in its first ever ODI team of the year for 2016.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#2 Deepti Sharma</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158676" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158676" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Deepti-Sharma.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158676" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Deepti-Sharma.jpg" alt="Deepti Sharma" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158676" class="wp-caption-text">Deepti Sharma. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>If you spot a 19-year-old livewire on the field, sporting a boy cut and energetic as ever, know that it is Deepti Sharma. “As an offspinner, opening left-handed bat, and an agile fielder in any position, India have an unbeatable combination in her,” said former all-rounder and coach Purnima Rau about Deepti, once.</p>
<p>She holds the record of scoring 188, the second-highest score in women&#8217;s ODIs and the record of being the youngest Indian, male or female, to take a five-wicket haul, with match-winning returns of 6 for 20 helped India complete a clean sweep over Sri Lanka. And, she’s still a teenager. Let that sink in.</p>
<p>Always ready to bring her A-game to the table, she willingly decided to mould herself from a natural right-hander to a left-handed grip, without any tutoring. She also switched from medium pace bowling to off-spin because it was pointed out that her action was more suited to that.</p>
<p>Suresh Raina is her favorite. If you saw her taking the return catch to dismiss Danielle Wyatt in the game against England in the ongoing World Cup, you would know that not only does she want to replicate his inside-out shot for six, she successfully matched his reflexes too.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#3 Shikha Pandey</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158677" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158677" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Shikha-Pandey.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158677" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Shikha-Pandey.jpg" alt="Shikha Pandey" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158677" class="wp-caption-text">India bowler Shikha Pandey. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>Fl Lt Shikha Pandey, Jersey Number 12 of Indian Women Cricket Team and an officer in the Indian Air Force is the right way to address her. She is a right-arm medium pacer and a middle-order batter in the team, Shikha is the first woman cricketer from Goa and only the second player, male or female, from Goa, to play in the Indian national team.</p>
<p>She made her international T20 debut against Bangladesh at Cox’s Bazar cricket stadium in 2014. Her ODI and Test debut followed in the next month in England. Shikha, in her summer vacation, would spend her time watching cricket matches and bowling against a wall, imitating the actions of various international bowlers, her best impersonation being that of Daniel Vettori.</p>
<p>“Hitting the winning runs together with Mithali Raj against England in one of the tests that we played at Wormsley, England, in August, was an amazing experience. Also, my five-wicket haul against Haryana in the one-day tournament and a 56 ball 73 against Jharkhand in the T-20 tournament are some of the moments I’ll always cherish,” she said about her favourite moments.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>#4 Ekta Bisht</h3>
<figure id="attachment_58041" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-58041" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2016/03/Ekta-Bisht.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-58041" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Ekta-Bisht.jpg" alt="Ekta Bisht" width="600" height="469" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-58041" class="wp-caption-text">Ekta Bisht of India. (Photo by Christopher Lee-ICC/ICC via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>It is said that Ekta Bisht has what it takes to be in the league of women who are considered the best spin bowlers India has produced. She hails from Almora, Uttarakhand, and is the only cricketer from that state to play for India. She made her debut in 2011 and has more than a hundred international wickets across both ODIs and T20s.</p>
<p>She is the team’s best spinner and is often the captain’s go-to bowler when the pace bowlers are expensive. Her game in the ICC Women World Cup qualifier helped the team thrashed Pakistan by seven wickets. Her haul is the fourth best by an Indian bowler in ODIs. In the match, she bowled a total of seven maidens, the joint-most by any Indian bowler in the ODIs. She is the only Indian woman to claim a T20 hat-trick, that came up against Sri Lanka in the 2012 World T20.</p>
<p>If there’s even slight assistance from the pitch, expect Bisht to spin a web for the opposition. More so, because she’s brilliant when field restrictions are in place. Since February 2016, her bowling average has been 16.53 at an economy rate of 2.93.</p>
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<h3>#5 Punam Raut</h3>
<figure id="attachment_158678" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-158678" style="width: 640px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/2017/04/Punam-Raut.jpg"><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-158678" src="https://media.crictracker.com/media/attachments/Punam-Raut.jpg" alt="Punam Raut" width="640" height="400" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px"></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-158678" class="wp-caption-text">India batsman Poonam Raut. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure>
<p>She was the winner of BCCI’s best junior cricketer award in 2011 and this World Cup, is her fifth World Cup overall, in addition to two T20 World Cups. She made her International debut in 2009 and it was in a World Cup where she played just one game. Despite promising performances, her journey with the Indian cricket team has been a roller coaster ride, because she was not able to make the opening spot her own on the back of few odd good innings.</p>
<p>She was out of the team, but her comeback has been inspirational. Raut plays for Indian Railways and lost her place in the Indian team that toured West Indies and the World Cup qualifiers in Sri Lanka. With help from senior team-mate, Jhulan Goswami, coach Sanjay Gaitonde and former India wicket-keeper Chandrakant Pandit helped her iron out her flaws, leading to her comeback.</p>
<p>Gaitonde and Pandit worked towards changing her grip and back lift which made a considerable difference in her batting. &#8220;My grip was predominantly bottom handed. They told me to use my top hand more on my shots. I faced around 300 throw downs daily and ultimately it helped me play those long shots and I could clear the ropes easily,&#8221; told Mid-Day before leaving for the marquee event.</p>
<p>She scored a brilliant 86 in the first match against England, and was dismissed for a duck in the next match against the Windies but don’t rule her out yet. She is the queen of comebacks.</p>

Here's all you need to know about these 5 Indian women players

Here's all you need to know about these 5 Indian women cricketers

Let’s face it. Our Women in Blue deserve as much praise as our Men in Blue. Be it the appreciation, the monetary reward, the limelight, media coverage