Lucknow: Somewhere between a district ground in Agra and the electric bowl of Lucknow’s KD Singh Babu Stadium, something has shifted in Uttar Pradesh cricket — and this week it becomes visible.On September 23, the city’s first-ever Women’s Cricket League got underway, running through September 28, with local sides like the REPL Lucknow Challengers taking the field. It’s a small tournament by the numbers, but it’s the kind of small that tends to precede something much bigger.
For years, UP cricket ran on a familiar script: it produced talent and then watched that talent leave. Promising cricketers moved elsewhere to find professional structure, better pay, or simply somewhere that took them seriously. That script is being rewritten. The Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association has been quietly laying groundwork for a full women’s state league modeled on the men’s UP T20 League — with women’s matches planned around the opening and closing of the tournament’s fourth season, and a six-team women’s competition targeted for next year, run alongside the men’s league. It’s the kind of plan officials have been sitting on for a while, one insider said, and it’s finally close to landing on solid ground.
The numbers explain the urgency. A BBC and Collective Newsroom study, drawing on Kantar research from December 2025 to January 2026, found that women’s cricket participation in Uttar Pradesh has jumped tenfold since 2020 — from 1% to 10% — outpacing the national average, which merely doubled over the same period. Among women aged 15 to 24, the share who now see sport as a viable career has climbed from 16% to 26%. Much of that surge traces back to a single moment: India’s 2025 Women’s ODI World Cup win, which seems to have done for a generation of young women in UP what a single Saturday afternoon and a trophy lift can sometimes do — make something feel possible that didn’t before.
But the same research is honest about what’s still holding people back. Roughly two-thirds of non-participants cite simple lack of time. Nearly half still rate women’s sport as less entertaining than the men’s game, and — more uncomfortably — 46% believe sportswomen ought to be “attractive,” a number that’s actually risen since 2020. And 13% of women who don’t play cite safety concerns outright. Progress, in other words, isn’t a straight line — it’s a tug-of-war between opportunity opening up and old attitudes refusing to fully let go.
If UP cricket has a face for this moment, it’s Deepti Sharma. The Agra-born allrounder captains the UP Warriorz in the WPL, and her résumé speaks for itself: the first Indian cricketer, men’s or women’s, to reach 100 T20I wickets, now sitting at 138. She pulled off the first hat-trick by an Indian bowler in WPL history, against Delhi Capitals, and across 17 games for the Warriorz she’s contributed 385 runs and 19 wickets — the definition of a reliable, franchise-anchoring player.
The men’s UP T20 League, meanwhile, has become something closer to a finishing school for players headed toward the IPL and WPL. Its fourth edition split across two cities this year — Lucknow’s Ekana Stadium in mid-August, then Kanpur’s Green Park through early September — backed by a ₹3 crore prize pool and a July mini-auction in Agra that filled 45 slots across six franchises. With Suresh Raina as brand ambassador and broadcast reach extending into 100–200 countries, the league has also made a point of pushing into UP’s 75 districts through a rural banner and hoarding contest, so its footprint doesn’t stop at stadium walls. Notably, the association has started reining in reliance on outside coaching and officiating staff, choosing instead to build up homegrown expertise — a sign it wants this ecosystem to be self-sustaining, not imported.
