WPL has set the stage, now the playfield needs to get bigger: Mithali Raj

Hammering boundaries: Meet Mithali Raj, former captain, Indian women's cricket team

“It’s unbelievable, I know, but I still haven’t taken a holiday,” Mithali Raj says, breaking out into laughter halfway through the thought. “My mother is always admonishing me for it, saying that I’m just packing and leaving and then coming back home to basically pack again. But that’s how it’s been.” 

It’s a lazy Friday morning and we are talking across a computer screen — Raj is in Mumbai for the Women’s Premier League (WPL) and I am in Delhi. I tell her that this interview is ideally done in person and over a meal. “Oh man, that would’ve been good,” she smiles. “I would’ve loved to do that!” Except she can’t. Because nine months after retiring from all forms of cricket, Mithali Raj, 40, has no time for anything outside the game. Yes, the irony is evident to her, too. And so a coffee will do. She raises her cup to clink with mine, pixels clashing against pixels.  

At the time of our conversation, Raj is working as a mentor with the WPL outfit, Adani Gujarat Giants. The team, filled with youngsters, has had a rough run of results. It eventually finishes the league with two wins from eight games, and fails to qualify for the final, which Mumbai Indians win on March 26. Raj is not too fussed about the results. 

For a woman who was known to be a perfectionist in her playing days, spending hours in the nets and even using the time outside the pitch to hone her skills, this is a drastic change. But then everything about Raj in the dugout without the playing jersey has been a revelation. She was the stoic, composed player, who waited her turn to bat by reading Rumi in the dressing room — “I haven’t had a chance to read a book since I retired either”. 

For her, the season has been about allowing young players their day in the sun. “When they (the Adani Sportsline group) asked me to join them, it was clear that this project wasn’t about winning and getting short-term results,” she says. “We are in it for the long game.”

The WPL has come at a time when women’s cricket has entered the Indian mainstream.

The Indian women's team is now a contender for every tournament it enters, and making the semi-finals is almost a minimum requirement. The crowds in Mumbai (the venue for the inaugural edition) and the quality of cricket (type the name Sophie Devine in your search engine) are testament to how exponentially the game has grown. 

In the midst of this, while most WPL outfits signed big international names and Indian stars, the Giants squad is made of young starlets, and relative unknowns. What might look like a lack of ambition is anything but. 

Raj says the decision to do so was carefully thought out. There was a desire to give Indian girls — many with little experience of this level of competition — a stage and some game time to get experience. Their biggest star is 24-year-old batter Harleen Deol, and their mentor, nine months retired. 

We do the obvious question first. Is there any regret at having retired when she did, just as the tide was turning? “I know, right?” she laughs. “In fact Jhulan (Goswami) and I were talking about it the other day. We were wondering if we were the problem.” Goswami also retired at around the same time as Raj, having served in the Indian team for almost two decades; she is a mentor with the current champions, the Mumbai Indians.

It’s worth thinking that when Raj made her debut, in 2002, the aforementioned Deol was three years old. When Deol debuted for the Indian ODI team in 2019, Raj was still there, and had in fact just become the first woman player to have played for two decades at the highest level. Between Raj and Goswami are 436 Women’s ODIs and 157 Women’s Twenty20 Internationals. If one was the scalpel (Raj has the most runs in women’s ODIs), then the other the bludgeon (Goswami has bowled the most deliveries of any woman in ODIs). Over long distinguished careers, they proved that the women’s game is equal in every respect. 

The only blemish on Raj’s own record is, perhaps, a brutal indictment of the women’s game even today. Raj played for India for almost two decades, but she played a mere 12 Tests. Barely a Test a year, she says. 

This is a problem for women’s cricket outside of countries not called England and Australia. The Indian women have played a mere two Tests over the last five years. Over the same period, South Africa, the third-ranked Women’s ODI team, have played just one — they have only played 13 Tests in their history. Even Australia and England have only played seven Tests between themselves over the past five years. In the women’s game, the long format remains a frontier barely breached. 

With such few opportunities, it’s worth asking if women cricketers value Test cricket as much as we, nostalgic, primarily male audiences do. Raj brushes the doubts aside quickly. 

“Absolutely, it’s a draw,” she says. “There is no better way to test yourself in this game than Test cricket. Every player wants to play it, and can I just also say that the few opportunities that our girls get, they account very well for themselves.” The Indian women played a one-off Test against Australia and another against England in 2021, drawing both. 

Despite the introduction of the WPL, the vast investment, the marketing and the interest from audiences, Raj acknowledges that there's still a long way to go for the women’s game. Domestically, women cricketers do not have many opportunities to showcase their skills, a fault that needs urgent attention.

“The WPL is a great platform for a lot of these players to come into the limelight,” Raj says. “But obviously it cannot be the only platform. Even in the men’s game, the IPL is the pinnacle, but there are so many other domestic tournaments, which allows a lot of players to hone their skills and climb the ladder. We need that for the women’s game, too.”

The obvious thing to do, then, is put more women within the administration, allow them to be decision-makers and path-charters. Raj is careful to acknowledge that while this may be true, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has gone a long way to grow the women’s game. “It’s a process,” she says. “And I’m hopeful that we will see more women in these roles soon enough.”

For her part, Raj’s immediate ambitions circle around trying to schedule a holiday — even if her calendar looks like it may not allow it. I suggest that she celebrate her one-year retirement anniversary with a break. “Yes, that would be great,” she says. “These are exciting times, though, and I don’t want to be lying around when it’s all happening.”