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

#1 Smriti Mandhana

Now a lot of us may know Smriti Mandhana 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.