NEWS
Follow UsMumbai Indians broke the bank for a 16-year-old wicketkeeper batter, G Kamalini, from Tamil Nadu. They spent 1.6 crore in acquiring her services for the upcoming 2025 season of the Women’s Premier League (WPL).
Kamalini, the second-highest run scorer in the Women’s U-19 Trophy after scoring 311 runs in eight matches, also scored 44* in just 29 deliveries in her first game of the Women’s U-19 Asia Cup against Pakistan. She smashed three sixes in her innings, and was also astute behind the stumps.
Coming from Madurai, Kamalini was enrolled in a local academy there, but seeing the improvement in her game and her natural talent, her parents took her to Chennai. She now practices in the Chennai Super Kings Academy under Sriram Krishnamurthy and Louis Mariano. She is also mentored by Aarti Sankaran, who does it on request of the National Cricket Academy (NCA).
The 16-year-old is already a star in Tamil Nadu cricket circles, where she ran away with the best women’s cricket award in the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association Awards (TNCA). She was also the leading run-scorer in the recent U-19 T20 tri-series between two India U-19 teams and one from South Africa, scoring 270 runs in just five innings.
From getting into cricket by just throwing balls at her brother Kishore, Kamalini has already come a long way. In her mentor Sankaran’s words, she is a “natural talent.”
“Kamalini is what you call a natural talent,” Sankaran told the Indian Express in an interview.
“Everything comes so easily to her and that's how she has been able to convert into a wicketkeeper within six months. She has the drive and the hard work. We have seen a lot of girls just fizzle out after a point. But she is going to stay here for long,"
This INR 1.6 crore would also go a long way in helping her family come out of their financial troubles after her father’s health situation deteriorated a few years ago.
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