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Kya baat hain yarr'- Fans react as Smriti Mandhana opts out of WBBL for 2nd consecutive year

India women's team vice-captain Smriti Mandhana will not be part of the Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) to manage her workload.

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Rohit Kumar
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Smriti Mandhana

Smriti Mandhana (Source- Twitter)

India women's team vice-captain Smriti Mandhana will not be part of the Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) overseas draft after deciding to skip the T20 league for the second year in a row. She wants to be available for the domestic season that will coincide with the WBBL 2023.

There are 122 players in the overseas draft for the WBBL slated to get underway from October 19 with the final scheduled for December 2. Co-incidentally the Indian domestic season also starts from October 19 with the Senior Women’s T20 Trophy.

Smriti Mandhana opts out of WBBL for domestic season

India is set to host England and Australia from mid-December to mid-January for one Test each. Followed by the Senior Women's Inter-Zonal Trophy, from November 24 to December 4, while after a month, the Senior Women's One-Day Trophy will run from January 4 to 26.

The senior women's tournaments, the T20 Challenger Trophy and the Inter-Zonal One Day Trophy are missing from the calendar which was announced by the Indian Cricket Board earlier in April this year. The vice-captain was recently in action with The Hundred Women 2023 tournament, she was playing for the Southern Brave team. The team won the championship, she was the 6th highest run tally in the tournament with an impressive 238 runs from 9 games, boasting a strike rate of 133.70, including two half-centuries.

The women's calendar saw the addition of the inaugural Women Premier League (WPL) earlier this year, in which Mandhana was the most expensive player for INR 3.4 crore at the auction, and also captain of Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), who won just two of their eight games and finished second from bottom.

In 2021-2022 led the scoring charts for Sydney Thunder with 377 runs at a strike rate of 130.44. She also won the Arjun Award at the age of 22 and was judged the Women's ODI Player of the Year by the Cricket Governing Body.

List of Indian players in WBBL 2023-24 draft:

Harmanpreet Kaur, Jemimah Rodrigues, Deepti Sharma, Yastika Bhatia, Harleen Deol, Hurley Gala, Richa Ghosh, Mannat Kashyap, Amanjot Kaur, Veda Krishnamurthy, Shikha Pandey, Shreyanka Patil, Sneh Rana, Meghana Sabbineni, Meghna Singh, Renuka Thakur, Pooja Vastrakar, and Radha Yadav.

Here's how fans reacted: 

Smriti Mandhana