Pratika Rawal became India Women’s 150th ODI cricketer when Harmanpreet Kaur and Co. took the field for the first ODI against the West Indies on Sunday, December 22 at the Kotambi Stadium in Vadodara. The 24-year-old opened the batting alongside Smriti Mandhana, who recently won the Player of the Series award in India’s 2–1 series win over the Caribbean team.
India vs West Indies, 1st Women’s ODI Updates
In fact, it was Smriti who gave Rawal her maiden ODI cap before the series opener. Rawal started playing cricket at the age of 10 and is a psychology student.
Rawal first came to the limelight in the Senior Women’s One-Day Trophy in 2021, where she scored 247 runs from seven games at an average of 49.40 and a strike-rate of 78.41. The young right-handed batter also notched an unbeaten 161 off 155 balls with 19 fours and five sixes for Delhi against Assam at the Maharana Pratap College ground in Dehradun.
Earlier this year, Rawal captained Delhi to the final of the Under-23 T20 Trophy final where they lost to Madhya Pradesh by three runs in the final. She was the second highest run-scorer for her team after Tanisha Singh, having scored 182 runs from nine matches at an average of 26 and a strike-rate of 85.94.
In the previous edition of the Senior Women’s One-Day Trophy, Rawal was the second-highest run-scorer. In eight matches, Pratika made 411 runs at an average of 68.50 and a strike-rate of 91.94 with two centuries and a top score of 141 to show for her efforts. Rawal also played for East Delhi Riders in the Women’s Delhi Premier League.
After the Women’s T20 World Cup in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), India handed ODI caps to six cricketers, one of whom was Pratika. The others are Minnu Mani, Tejal Hasabnis, Titas Sadhu, Saima Thakor and Priya Mishra. Saima and Uttarakhand’s Raghvi Bist also made their T20I debuts against the West Indies earlier this month.
