India’s Women’s Premier League is a giant leap: we are hyped as much as the men

T he Women’s Premier League has everyone buzzing. To say I’ve never experienced anything like it before would be an understatement. Everything here is hyped to the max – training, meetings, games, crowds, most of all the media. Everywhere we turn, there are cameras filming. At Royal Challengers Bangalore the ambition is to be as big a brand, with as big a social media footprint, as Real Madrid or FC Barcelona. And at a franchise so well organised and ambitious as RCB, that means 18 cricket players and 20 content creators.

In India, cricket is its own entity. When a billion people follow, the game’s value is enormous. To know the first year of TV rights for the WPL was bigger than the first IPL is phenomenal.

The auction itself was the weirdest thing and I hated every second. It felt like horse trading. I was interested in Ash Gardner so a few of us were on her Facetime call to her mum, with her brother doing live conversion rates as the bidding got to $558,000. We’d known there might be an obscene level of coin but half a million bucks? It was so strange.

As for me, I knew I’d be toward the end, with the nobodies and bowlers no one cares about. Tahlia McGrath told me to sit down. “You’ve got to watch to see if you get sold,” she said. I felt weird but I switched it on. When I saw I was unsold after the first round I switched it off again. But RCB coach Ben Sawyer said: “I don’t want to jinx it but wait until the last round.” At that stage I’d resigned myself either way. Not picked up? That sucks but I get to go home. But then I got picked up (for $69,000) and that means another month away from home.

The overriding feeling was one of excitement. For me it was huge. Now I’m at the latter end of my career, the WPL is a