Indian batter Jemimah Rodrigues will be seen in a Northern Supercharger’s jersey in the first edition of England’s unique domestic league, The Hundred, which will start from July.
Jemimah Rodrigues is one of the few cricketers to get a Non-objection certificate (NOC) from the Board of Control for Cricket in India to play The Hundred. Harmanpreet Kaur, Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, and Shafali Varma are the other cricketers who will be participating in The Hundred.
Scheduled to be inaugurated in the year 2020, The Hundred got delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic but now will be played in the month of July for 5 weeks. The Hundred is a gender-balanced league in which 8 men’s teams and 8 women’s teams will compete simultaneously to be the first team to win this one-of-a-kind league.
Jemimah is the first Indian cricketer to officially confirm that she has signed up with a team to play in The Hundred. The 20-year-old batter revealed in a podcast with BBC, that she will be playing for the Yorkshire-based franchise Northern Superchargers in her debut season.
Jemimah Rodrigues has become a big name in a short time. She has represented India in 16 One-Day Internationals and 43 T20 Internationals. She has also played county cricket alongside the Yorkshire Diamonds in the Kia Super League 2019, where she created a buzz by scoring the highest individual score of 112* against Southern Vipers. Northern Superchargers have big names like the Australian wicket-keeper batter Alyssa Healy and Australian all-rounder Nicola Carey.
Rodrigues’s stay in England is going to be a long one as Indian women are going to tour England for a three-format series for June and July. India will play a one-off test match, 3 One-day Internationals, and 3 T20 Internationals.
She had a chat with Sportstar and expressed her happiness of playing her first-ever test match, “It’s very exciting. I remember when the women’s Ashes would go on, we would watch it on television and often wonder, “apna time kab aayega?” (When will our time come?). There is something special about those jerseys and we cannot wait to lay our hands on the whites and play Test cricket for India. Yes, there will be ODIs and T20Is, but Test cricket will always be something different. I am looking forward to it,”
“Honestly, no one expected the Test match to happen so soon. We all knew that it would happen for sure, but no one thought that it would happen so quickly. So, everyone is excited. Yes, more than anything else, it’s a dream come true. Test match is all about the mindset and how I approach it. I will leave my past behind and approach it in a new way.”
