Yashika Goel
For the eighth season of the Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL), the Australian Twenty20 Cricket Franchise Team, the Melbourne Stars, has signed Indian batter Jemimah Rodrigues. By being the first Indian player to ever play for the Stars, she made history.
👋 Hi @JemiRodrigues pic.twitter.com/RbrYXSShmg
— Melbourne Stars (@StarsBBL) September 6, 2022
“I am beyond thrilled to join the Stars family.” It is an honour for me to sign with the Stars as the first Indian player in history. I can’t wait to return to Melbourne, which has always been my favourite Australian city, Jemimah stated in a statement to the media.
Melbourne Stars:
Rodrigues won’t join the Melbourne Stars team until she has finished representing India in the Asia Women’s Cup, which will be held in Bangladesh from October 1 to October 16, 2022.
On September 5, 2022, Rodrigues, who was born in Mumbai, turned 22. After playing 50 T20 Internationals and 21 ODIs, she is already at the pinnacle of her career. The second woman after Smriti Mandhana to achieve a double century in a 50-over cricket competition is Rodrigues, who made her Women’s Twenty20 International debut against South Africa in 2018. She was a member of the Indian team that competed in the 2020 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup in Australia, and her 249 runs were good for second-most in the women’s hundred competition.
She received her nomination for the International Cricket Council (ICC) Women’s Player of the Month award for August 2022 on the day of her birthday. This followed her noteworthy performance at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham’s Edgbaston, where she won a silver medal in the women’s T20 competition. She scored 33 runs in the championship game, but it was her 44 unbeaten runs against England in the semifinals that made sure India played in the first-ever women’s T20 match at the multisport competition. In total, Rodrigues scored 146 runs during the contest.
In the final WBBL season, Rodrigues made 333 runs at a strike rate of over 116 while playing for the Melbourne Renegades, a cross-town rival of the Stars, in the final WBBL season. Along with Pooja Vastrakar, who will play for the Brisbane Heat, and Indian captain Harmanpreet Kaur, who has been signed by the Melbourne Renegades, Rodrigues is the third female cricketer to join the WBBL.
