Published 2026-11-05 · By Divya Kaul (WPL & Franchise League Columnist · Chennai Desk)
It is a warm early-November evening in Chennai and the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium sits quiet, its sight screens blank, a season still rehearsing somewhere in the wings. A year ago this week, the countdown that mattered was at DY Patil Stadium, where India lifted a first-ever 50-over World Cup in Navi Mumbai. This week, the player who carried the women's game across two decades before any of that — Mithali Raj — sat down for a wide-ranging BBC conversation about how far the sport has travelled and how much further she believes it can go. For anyone tracking cricket news in India, it reads less like an interview and more like a manifesto for the next era.
A legend reads her own sequel
Mithali's tone was neither nostalgic nor defensive. She spoke of a generation of young girls who no longer have to explain who Smriti Mandhana is, of fathers queueing at district trials with their daughters in tier-2 towns, and of a professional pathway that simply did not exist when she debuted as a 16-year-old in 1999. Her future aspirations, she made clear, are about structure over sentiment: a deeper domestic pyramid, franchise teams that genuinely invest in Indian benches, and Test cricket reclaimed as a fixture rather than a curiosity of the women's calendar.
Reading it from the Chennai desk, what strikes me most is the vocabulary shift. This is no longer a legend talking about “opportunity.” She is talking about an “ecosystem” — franchise-era language, WPL language.
The timing of her reflection is pointed. India are world champions on the exact anniversary of that Navi Mumbai night, the Women's Premier League has completed three full seasons of auctions, broadcast audiences and fierce hometown fanbases, and regional engagement trackers such as luckx.club now chart women's franchise content pulling attention in cities well beyond the original metro strongholds — Rajkot, Guwahati, Coimbatore. Mithali, whose 2017 Lord's final lit the fuse, sees the task now as retention rather than discovery.
From Velocity to victory arcs
Indian supporters of a certain vintage will remember that Mithali was a franchise cricketer before the WPL existed, captaining Velocity in the Women's T20 Challenge — the compact precursor whose stands in Pune and Sharjah felt like auditions for something larger. When the league launched in 2023, Mumbai Indians and then Bengaluru's red army swept early titles behind marquee Indian stars, invested overseas professionals and match-winner arcs from domestic finds. It was, almost beat for beat, the template she had quietly advocated all along: build depth, then let depth win you finals late in a chase.
“The World Cup was the permission slip; the WPL is the pay cheque. Mithali spent twenty-three years earning one so this generation could sign the other.”
The engine room: what the WPL has already built
- A guaranteed salary band and a contracts culture for roughly a hundred contracted professionals.
- Standalone broadcasts and marketing, ending the era of women's cricket sharing cramped windows at the edge of the men's season.
- A visible pathway from state T20 cricket to league rosters, where an unheralded offspinner in Bengaluru can be a household name within a summer.
- Genuine city fandoms — Mumbai blue, Bangalore red, Delhi gold — that fill stands and trend locally in a way television numbers alone never could.
And if the legend's numbers needed an argument of their own, the scoreboard of a career reads like a founding document:
| Milestone | Figure |
|---|---|
| ODI caps | 232 |
| ODI runs | 7,618 — the most in women's ODI history |
| ODI average | 50.57 |
| World Cup finals led | 2005, 2017 |
| Record streak | Seven consecutive ODI fifties |
| International career | 1999–2022 |
Why the south should lean in
Here is the part that should interest Tamil Nadu. If the league stretches southward — and Mithali's stated aspiration for a longer schedule, more centres and a bigger auction pool points exactly there — Chepauk's wicket-literate crowd is precisely the audience the women's game deserves. Chennai applauds a bowled cover drive as loudly as a slog swept through cow corner; it respects craft, and the WPL's second wave of Indian talent now has craft in abundance. Her point about tier-2 momentum, cities like Coimbatore and Rajkot feeding the pipeline, is less wishful thinking than scouting blueprint.
When Mithali says she wants the women's game to stop being described as “growing” and simply be described as an industry, she is naming the finish line. On this November evening, with a title in the cabinet and a league still finding its feet across towns we are only beginning to count, the distance to that line has never looked shorter.
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