Kia Super League | Yorkshire Diamonds sign Jemimah Rodrigues for upcoming season
Indian Women’s Cricket player Jemimah Rodrigues became the third Indian to confirm her participation in the fourth season of Kia Super League as she signed for the Yorkshire outfit. She will be third Indian player in the tournament alongside senior players Smriti Mandhana and Harmanpreet Kaur.
The last season of Kia Super League saw Smriti Mandhana topping the tournament’s run-scoring charts with an excellent haul of 421 while Indian T20 skipper Harmanpreet Kaur scored multiple half centuries too and made even a bigger name for herself globally. Both are expected to return to the league to play with their old teams, namely Western Storm and Lancashire Thunder respectively.
This probably was the key factor, apart from the opportunity to gain experience while playing alongside world-class players and make a name for oneself on the grand platform provided by the tournament, that encouraged the swashbuckling 19-year-old batsman from Mumbai to sign for the Diamonds. She has had a brilliant start to her international career and starred for the Blues over the last year and a half, scoring at a strike rate of 123.57 and an average of 30.40 in the 25 T20Is she has played so far.
To top it all off, she was named the Player of the Tournament in the recently concluded Women’s T20 Challenge, where she dominated some of the world’s very best bowlers and came out on top in Jaipur, amassing 123 runs in the three games in the tournament at an average of 61.50.
"More than anything, it's the experience of playing in an overseas league that will count for a teenager like Jemimah.Her progress since her India debut last year has been steady, with the god's grace, and we want this experience to help her be an even better player," said Lavita Rodrigues, Jemimah’s mother.
The tournament, which will off on the sixth of August, will see Surrey Stars trying to defend their crown.