Women's Premier League: Breaking barriers

The stadium is packed every day, the matches are edge-of-the-seat affairs featuring muscular six hitting, wily spin bowling pacers knocking down stumps, great catches and eye-catching athleticism on the field.

- Rudraneil Sengupta

The stadium is packed every day, the matches are edge-of-the-seat affairs featuring muscular six hitting, wily spin bowling pacers knocking down stumps, great catches and eye-catching athleticism on the field. The players are well paid—in fact they are paid far more at this tournament than anywhere else. Those who watch the IPL will be familiar with these details but this is the Women's Premier League, or WPL, we are talking about—breaking barriers and transforming women's cricket one season at a time.

The third season of the WPL kicked off to a capacity stadium earlier this month, even though, for the first time in its short history, spectators have to pay to enter. This is particularly significant because it's upending a core belief that held the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) back from organising a women's league for many years—that people won't come to watch them.

The crowded stands at Vadodara's Kotambi stadium—one of the developments this season is that the league has spread to four venues instead of two, adding Vadodara and Lucknow, two cities usually starved of quality cricket, to last season's venues Mumbai and Bengaluru—is like a real-life manifestation of a line from Nike's latest ad featuring women athletes: "You can't fill a stadium...so fill that stadium."

With an air of inevitability, the crowds got more than their money's worth of excitement.

The opening game featuring defending champions Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) and Gujarat Giants (GG) yielded a total of 403 runs, the highest aggregate in the IPL, and as Smriti Mandhana-led RCB smashed their way to overhaul GG's total of 201, the spectators had the pleasure of witnessing the highest successful run chase in the league.