Harmanpreet Kaur demands for more Women's Test Cricket

India skipper Harmanpreet Kaur has demanded for more Women’s tests as well as continuation of long duration domestic cricket in India. The 34 year old is the clear representative of the top-level women’s cricket of her time in how many games she played in each of the three formats: only three Test matches along with 127 ODIs and 154 T20Is. 

“As a player I definitely want more Tests because as a growing kid we saw more Tests on TV than T20s," Harmanpreet said while interviewed on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast. "Nowadays it's a lot of fun playing T20s but Test cricket is something every cricketer wants to play.

"This year we have two Tests - one against England and one against Australia - and I hope those games can make a huge impact on women's cricket and hopefully in the future we will keep getting more Test matches. We have to bring back Test matches in women's cricket because it's very important for women's cricket." 

2017-18 was the last time when multi-day domestic women cricket was conducted. The Indian Cricket Board organised an Inter-Zonal three- day tournament as well as Inter-Zonal Under-19 two-day tournament. While Harmanpreet is content with the progress of Women’s Cricket thus far, particularly with the start of the Women’s T20 League, she hopes long duration cricket to resume soon 

"Trust me, [domestic cricket] has improved a lot," she said. "Initially when I started playing we hardly got domestic games but for the last couple of years domestic level has improved a lot. We are getting more games and some domestic games are live also, people can watch them on TV.

"It is improving day by day but in my early days we used to play two- and three-day games which we are really missing, and I'm sure after these two Test matches hopefully we'll get two-day matches back. The more cricket we get, the more improvement we'll see in women's cricket.

"Definitely it's improving day by day and [I] hope to see some more talent in the Indian side. As you mentioned WPL was a game-changing moment for us, the tournament was so good, everyone loved it back home, we had a great experience and hopefully next year we'll get some more young talent who can take this cricket higher."

After years of players expressing their desire to compete in women’s franchise T20 tournaments along the lines of the Ind T20 League, the Women T20 League kicked off in 2023, with the Harmanpreet-led Mumbai being crowned as the inaugural champions.  

“Yes definitely it's a little late to be honest but something is better than nothing," Harmanpreet said, when asked if it had taken too long for the WPL to get off the ground. "At least it started and started in such a way that everyone liked it. Maybe we were a little scared, [wondering] what if people won't like it, but the response we got for WPL, some of the audience, they were more interested in women's IPL than men's because it was something new to watch and they really liked it. Hopefully after some years we'll add more teams, more players."