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Cricket PlayersNandani Sharma: From playing under the shadows to WPL hero
Against GG, Nandani Sharma became the first Indian pacer & uncapped player to take a WPL hat-trick
Chandigarh: On a warm Sunday evening at the DY Patil Stadium, it was Delhi Capitals’ medium-pacer Nandani Sharma – playing only her second Women’s Premier League (WPL) match – who had ignited the crowd with a sensational hat-trick.
The match may not have gone Delhi Capitals’ way as Gujarat Giants sneaked in a narrow 4-run win, but Sharma ensured her name echoed across the league. After conceding 16 runs in her first over, the 24-year-old from Chandigarh stormed back to claim a five-wicket haul, finishing with a dream spell (5/33). Bowling the final over, she dismissed Renuka Thakur, Rajeshwari Gayakwad, Kanika Ahuja and her state captain Kashvee Gautam, following her earlier crucial breakthrough of Sophie Devine — who had blasted 95 off 42 balls.
“I just wanted to hit my target,” Sharma said, with the newly-earned purple cap on her head. “Shafali and Jemi kept talking to me ball by ball. After my first over, I realised they were reading my stock delivery well, so I had to use my variations. Thankfully it worked.”
With that hat-trick, Sharma became only the fourth bowler in WPL history to achieve the feat after Issy Wong, Deepti Sharma and Grace Harris. But where had Nandani been all these years?
Three WPL seasons had passed without her finding a team. Last year, she got close, turning up as a net bowler for Royal Challengers Bangalore. In 2023, she even attended the Gujarat Giants trials alongside Kashvee Gautam, hoping to finally break through. She didn’t.
“Since a long time, Nandani was known as a useful swing bowler with good pace, quite like Shikha Pandey,” said senior coach Khyati Gulani. “But she needed that one breakthrough. When she didn’t get picked, she started rebuilding everything… skills, fitness and mindset.”
Her grind through 2024 paid off a year later. Sharma was picked for the NCA U-23 Emerging Camp and later the BCCI Centre of Excellence high-performance camp. Though she narrowly missed out on selection for India A touring Australia ahead of the ODI World Cup, WPL scouts had noticed her.
“In the game against GG, her slower ball was exceptional,” Gulani explained. “She releases it from the back of the hand with an upright seam which is a rare skill. India needs such bowlers.”
Sharma’s journey began more than a decade ago when Deepinder Chabra, owner of Leaders in Cricket Club, spotted her playing tennis-ball cricket with boys in Chandigarh’s Bapu Dham Colony in 2012.
“She had strong arms even then,” Chabra recalled. “We enrolled her and her brother for free coaching at the academy. By 13-14, she was in the Punjab senior women’s team and later selected for the NCA U-19 camp.”
Her path, however, wasn’t linear. In 2019, when the UT Cricket Association received BCCI affiliation, Sharma shifted from Punjab to Chandigarh. There she played under the shadow of bigger names – first Amanjot Kaur and later. Only when Amanjot moved to PCA and Kashvee sat out with an injury could Sharma finally step into the spotlight.
By 2025, she had even captained Chandigarh’s senior women’s T20 side. Eventually, Delhi Capitals secured her for ₹20 lakh at the auction.
“Nandani has been amazing with her fitness in the last one-and-a-half years,” said Raj Yadav, Chandigarh women’s team’s fitness trainer. “She followed a structured plan, strict diet and overcame a disc bulge that once hampered her performance. She transformed herself because she knew this was her moment.”
She got further noticed after she played for North Zone in the inter zonal meet under Shafali Verma’s captaincy. And on Sunday, that moment arrived – from bowling in the bylanes of Bapu Dham Colony to a hat-trick hero in the WPL.
