Beyond Border-Gavaskar, India’s women are a Big Bash drawcard

Six Indian cricketers took the field across the Women’s Big Bash League in the summer of 2024-25, the largest Indian presence the competition had seen, and not one of them featured in the men’s Border-Gavaskar series filling Australian back pages. Smriti Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Shikha Pandey, Yastika Bhatia and Dayalan Hemalatha spread across four franchises, handing Indian-Australian families a second summer of cricket to follow, one organised around women wearing the colours of Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.

A record Indian presence in the Big Bash

The tenth WBBL season, which began on 27 October 2024, drew its Indian contingent through a mix of pre-draft signings and the October draft. Mandhana joined the Adelaide Strikers as a pre-draft pick. Deepti Sharma and Yastika Bhatia went to the Melbourne Stars. Jemimah Rodrigues and Shikha Pandey lined up for the Brisbane Heat. Hemalatha signed with the Perth Scorchers. Several of them arrived a few matches late, held back by an India one-day series against New Zealand, a reminder that these players answer first to their national side.

Mandhana carried the highest profile of the group. Her Big Bash history runs back to 2016-17 and takes in the Brisbane Heat, the Hobart Hurricanes and the Sydney Thunder before Adelaide, and across 43 matches she has scored 928 runs at an average of 25.08 and a strike rate of 131.82, with one hundred and five fifties, according to Cricket Australia’s records. That hundred, an unbeaten 114 for Sydney Thunder against the Melbourne Renegades in November 2021, sits among the highest individual scores in the tournament’s history. Her move to Adelaide reunited her with coach Luke Williams, who had guided Royal Challengers Bengaluru to the 2024 Women’s Premier League title under her captaincy. International duty limited her to five matches and 144 runs in 2024-25, a modest return for a batter of her standing.

Shikha Pandey produced the standout Indian performance of the season. The seam-bowling allrounder, left out of India’s T20 World Cup squad and therefore free for the whole tournament, took twelve wickets in her first Big Bash campaign and earned a place in the WBBL 2024-25 Team of the Tournament, the only Indian selected. Playing for the Brisbane Heat, she troubled top-order batters through the group stage and finished among the franchise’s leading wicket-takers, a late-career reward for a bowler who has served India for more than a decade.

Jemimah Rodrigues was the most productive of the Indian batters. Batting in the top and middle order for the Brisbane Heat, she gathered runs consistently and finished among the tournament’s better returns, the kind of season that made her the Heat’s marquee overseas pick again the following year. Rodrigues has become one of the most marketable young cricketers in the women’s game, a point underlined when Delhi Capitals named her their captain for the 2026 Women’s Premier League, taking over from the Australian Meg Lanning.

For the other three, the summer was harder. Yastika Bhatia made a promising start as a top-order wicketkeeper-batter for the Melbourne Stars before injury cut her season short. Deepti Sharma, one of the world’s leading spin-bowling allrounders, managed only a handful of runs and wickets in a quiet Melbourne campaign. Hemalatha struggled for form with the Perth Scorchers on her debut. Uneven individual returns did little to dent the wider point, that Indian names now appear on Big Bash team sheets as a matter of course.

The Women’s Premier League and a shared talent pool

The traffic runs in both directions. India’s Women’s Premier League, launched in 2023 with five franchises, arrived on the back of a landmark five-year media-rights deal worth 951 crore rupees, about 117 million US dollars, sold to Viacom18. Australian players were central from the first ball. Cricket Australia counted fourteen Australians in the inaugural WPL, around 40 per cent of the overseas contingent, prompting chief executive Nick Hockley to call it “a great result” for the Australian game.

Ashleigh Gardner became one of the most expensive overseas buys of that first auction, signed by the Gujarat Giants, while Ellyse Perry joined Royal Challengers Bangalore. Meg Lanning, one of Australia’s most successful captains, led Delhi Capitals in 2023 and 2024 with Rodrigues as her deputy in the first season, an Australian great and an India star sharing a dressing room. Later auctions drew Annabel Sutherland, bought by Delhi Capitals for around 364,000 Australian dollars, along with Phoebe Litchfield, Georgia Wareham and others across the league. Mumbai Indians won the inaugural title in 2023, Royal Challengers Bangalore took the 2024 edition and Mumbai reclaimed it in 2025.

The two competitions now feed the same pool of players and coaches. Williams took what he had learned with Mandhana at Bengaluru to Adelaide; Rodrigues carried her Big Bash form into a World Cup year. The scheduling has grown tighter as a result. When India hosted the one-day World Cup in late 2025, only Rodrigues took a WBBL contract for the eleventh season, and she left part of the way through.

An India World Cup that shifted the mood

India’s home World Cup reframed everything. On 2 November 2025 at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, India beat South Africa by 52 runs to win the Women’s Cricket World Cup for the first time, posting 298 for seven before bowling South Africa out for 246. Deepti Sharma took five wickets for 39 in the final and was named player of the tournament; Shafali Verma made 87 and took the player-of-the-match award. Two nights earlier, Rodrigues had produced an unbeaten 127 to carry India past defending champions Australia in a record run chase in the semi-final, an innings ESPNcricinfo later judged the women’s one-day batting performance of the year.

That title connected directly to the Big Bash story. The women lifting the trophy in Mumbai were, in several cases, the same players Australian crowds had watched weeks earlier. It also explained the thin Indian presence in the WBBL’s eleventh season, staged from 9 November to 13 December 2025 and won by the Hobart Hurricanes. With the World Cup finishing on 2 November, most India players stayed home. Rodrigues, the sole Indian in the league, joined the Brisbane Heat but withdrew after a few matches to support Mandhana, whose wedding had been postponed when her father fell ill. Heat officials called it “a challenging time” for the player and granted her request without argument.

A following that is growing among the diaspora

Off the field, the audience is changing. Cricket Australia’s multicultural action plan reported that close to 20 per cent of the country’s cricket participants come from South Asian backgrounds, with junior South Asian players making up almost one in five of the total. The governing body set a target of lifting South Asian representation in its state, first-class and Big Bash ranks to 8 per cent by 2027, part of a plan built around attendance, registration and representation.

The registration goal arrived early. In August 2025 Cricket Australia reported 103,232 South Asian Australians registered to play in the 2024-25 season, passing a target of 100,000 that had been set for 2027, two years ahead of schedule. Girls aged five to twelve from South Asian backgrounds rose 8 per cent to 5,346, and the girls’ entry program grew 11 per cent. Three players of Indian origin, Hasrat Gill, Samara Dulvin and Ribya Syan, were named in the Australia under-19 women’s squad, a sign of a pathway starting to carry diaspora talent upward.

For girls in Melbourne’s south-east or Sydney’s west, watching Mandhana drive through the covers for Adelaide or Rodrigues anchor a chase for Brisbane offers something the men’s Test rivalry cannot, a woman who looks like them, speaks a familiar language at home and plays for both India and an Australian club. Representation of that kind tends to convert into participation, which is what the registration figures suggest is happening.

What it means

For the diaspora, the Indian presence in the WBBL turns distant heroes into local fixtures and gives young girls role models within reach. For Australian cricket, the same players are drawcards and a bridge to the world’s fastest-growing cricket market, one the game’s administrators have openly courted through their broadcast, scheduling and community plans. The men’s Border-Gavaskar contest will keep its hold on the headlines. Alongside it, quietly and then rather less quietly, a second India-Australia cricket summer has taken shape, played by women, followed by families, and built to last well beyond any single season.