I watched her arrive for practice at a cricket stadium in Goa where the Delhi Capitals Women’s Premier League (WPL) team was training before the season started on January 9.
Deeya Yadav’s big stride on long legs was followed by the smooth swing of the bat, and the resounding crack that told you the ball was headed into the stands.
That’s how it went, over and over: ball, whack, flight.
It is this that has won Yadav a spot on the team. At 16, she is the youngest player to secure a WPL contract in the league’s four-year history. If she can hit this hard, this effortlessly, now, what mayhem will she be capable of in a couple of years?
Yadav, with her head full of wavy hair and grey eyes that sparkle, is well-placed to explore the answer to that question. She is practising and mingling with giants.
There is Marizanne Kapp, 36, the South African star of this year’s Delhi Capitals squad and one of the greatest all-rounders in the game. There is the South African Laura Wolvaardt, 26, who Yadav may get to open the batting with; one of only three women in the game’s history to score centuries in all formats. Also on the team are Shafali Verma, 21, Jemimah Rodrigues, 25, Sneh Rana, 31, and Shree Charani, 21, who helped win the 2025 ICC World Cup for India.
Is she nervous, given that her only cricketing experience has been with her Under-16 and Under-19 Haryana state teams? “No…,” Yadav says, as if that’s an odd question. “It’s fun!”
She picked cricket to prove a point. Naturally athletic, she loved sports as a child, but the boys in her neighbourhood in Pune wouldn’t let the little girl onto their teams. Furious, she convinced her father, a state-level cricketer-turned-IT executive, to train her. In months, was batting so well, the boys didn’t want to play without her.
She was eight at the time, but she knew cricket was what she wanted to do. She asked her parents to find her an academy, and enrolled.
Six months on, her coach told her father it was time to buy her a kit. Yadav was thrilled. She had wanted a real cricket kit “so badly, for so long”. She insisted her father buy her one immediately, she remembers, laughing, even though the nearest shop was an hour away. “I wouldn’t take no for an answer, so we skipped dinner to go and buy the kit. We got home past 11 pm, but I put on my pads and gloves, picked up the bat, and told my father, ‘Now please bowl to me’.”
During the pandemic, Yadav’s family decided to move back to their village in Haryana, and enrolled her in the academy on the outskirts of Gurugram where Shafali Verma trains. It is a testament to how much has changed that, less than a decade earlier, when Verma tried to join an academy in Haryana, no one wanted a girl in the ranks. When Yadav signed up in Gurugram in 2021, there were 50 other girls and women enrolled.
It would be a thrill to see this confident, irreverent teenager — the product of a new age — play in the WPL this year. But even if she doesn’t, she is already, at 16, getting the kind of exposure and experience the best players in the world could once only dream of.
(To reach out with feedback, email rudraneil@ gmail.com.The views expressed are personal)
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