In the swing of things Premium
The Hindu
Renuka Singh has had a remarkable year in international cricket, captivating fans with her ability to curve the ball and impressing peers with her quest for constant improvement
When Renuka Singh is asked to pose for a photograph, near the dressing room at the Shaheed Veer Narayan Singh Cricket Stadium in Raipur, she gets self-conscious. Flashing that shy smile of hers, she requests, “Please take it fast, everyone is looking at me.”
She may feel uncomfortable at the thought of her India-D teammates watching her while being photographed, but the fact is that the entire cricket-playing world has been watching her, fascinated, for the last one year. And what a remarkable year it has been for the India seamer after making her international debut in Australia back in October 2021.
The 26-year-old is now No. 3 on the ICC rankings for T20I bowlers. And she has established herself as one of the finest practitioners of swing bowling in international women’s cricket.
“I have been swinging the ball right from the beginning,” Renuka tells The Hindu at Raipur, during the Senior Women’s T20 Challenger Trophy. “And I continue to work on my swing; when there are days when I don’t get it right, I look at the video and try to see where I need to improve.”
Pawan Sen, the coach whom Renuka credits for helping her become the bowler she is, says he was impressed by her desire to improve and the enthusiasm with which she played cricket.
“Maybe she was a bit too enthusiastic when I began coaching her,” he says over the phone from Dharamshala. “She would ask me to teach her how to bowl the cutters and how to swing [the ball]. I told her she needed to learn getting the basics like line and length right first.”
But he had no doubt that she was a special talent when he first saw her at the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association’s women’s academy at Dharamshala. Renuka feels she probably would not have become a professional cricketer if that academy hadn’t come up in Himachal.
He has worn India’s blues, albeit in an Under-19 World Cup, with K.L. Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Harshal Patel and Jaydev Unadkat as his teammates. He has proudly adorned the Lion’s Crest — the famed Mumbai cricket logo — in all three formats. He has played with Yuvraj Singh, against Virat Kohli and Rahul Dravid and has the likes of Rahul and Joe Root in his illustrious list of dismissals. He is also a software developer for an IT giant, based in California. Virtually every middle-class Indian over the last three decades at some stage dreams of being either a cricketer or an IT professional. Saurabh Netravalkar has been combining two dreams, even after relocating to USA to pursue academics at the prestigious Cornell University in 2015.