In a team where a legend like Mithali Raj opens the order, someone like Smriti Mandhana goes all cylinders firing at the other end with someone like a Harmanpreet Kaur belting boundaries and sixes at free will down the order, it can be tough to carve one’s niche as a batswoman. But when you are young and ambitious, talented and focused like Jemimah Rodrigues, things don’t happen to chance.
Nor do they wait for the changing vagaries of time.
Kia Super League: Jemimah Rodrigues’ 112 Significance
But ever since Jemimah Rodrigues, merely 18, barely 10 ODIs old in the Indian team, has come to wield the bat, runs have been flowing in all directions.
Just recently Jemimah Rodrigues proved her high-ranking talent at a colossal T20 stage. A few hours back the performance of Jemimah Rodrigues Kia super league make stunning headlines in a format where not even her famous compatriots have scaled mesmerizing peaks.
Not yet out of her teens but ripping apart bowling attacks with the surgical precision of a pro, Jemimah Rodrigues’ 112 emerged as a diamond of a knock for her Yorkshire Diamonds, an inning that smashed the Southern Vipers to the smithereens.
In giving her T20 side a thrilling final-ball win against the Southern Vipers, Jemimah Rodrigues’ 112 also became the fastest-ever century in a Women’s Cricket Super League (20 overs per side).
While this was her first-ever century in an international Women’s Cricket Super League, it became a record-smashing one.
A fast-paced, record-shattering effort
It took the Mumbai batswoman only 51 deliveries to reach what became a memorable ton, a knock that saw her break Proteas batswoman Lizelle Lee’s record, the prodigious right-hander scoring her ton back in the day off 55 deliveries.
Scoring a hundred regardless of format is always special. But when one is able to reach a milestone such as a fast-paced ton in the sport’s briefest format, one no stranger to surprises and dejections, thrill and daring, the effort rises to become as something of a timeless deed.
Jemimah Rodrigues’ 112 won’t be forgotten for the times to come not in the least that it came in a contest that draws world-beating names from all cricket playing nations but also because it casts the right-hander in a league of her own.
This is the highest individual score by an Indian batswoman in any overseas T20 league.
What’s more?
It also paves the way to bracket the talent of Indian batswomen in a special, elite firmament. Last year, it was Smriti Mandhana’s heroics that catapulted the Western Storm to everyone’s attention. Mandhana, then playing her maiden Women’s T20 league in England struck a memorable hundred.
This year, a few months down the line, her younger compatriot has risen tumultuously to fire a record-breaking century of a very high class.
Rodrigues’ inning was carved by 17 eye-popping boundaries and 1 huge six and was completely laced in entertainment, staying true to the DNA of the format.
It mustn’t be forgotten that Jemimah’s heroics came against a balanced bowling attack led by the famous troika of Suzie Bates, Danielle Wyatt, and Tash Farrant. But barring the left-arm medium pacers of Farrant, there was nothing worth remembering in the bowling attack of the Vipers, Rodrigues’ gritty punches and pulls tearing apart a starry line-up as the likes of Bates went for over 12 an over.
The headline-embracing knock will also keep the youngster’s confidence in good stead and that early exposure in a career that’s only just begun will add to the spring in the steps of the determined run-maker from India.