India Women’s captain Mithali Raj reveals why she wore pads while bestowing Test jerseys to other players

Senior player and currently the skipper of the Indian Women cricket team Mithali Raj is paying full attention to the upcoming England tour where Team India will take on England women in the only Test match.

This will be the first time in seven years that the Indian women’s team will be playing a Test match. Mithali will be captaining the side in the Test match, which shall commence from June 16. Notably, India last played a red-ball contest in November 2014 against South Africa in Mysore.

Ahead of the epic Test, head coach Ramesh Powar had organised a meeting of the squad members on Sunday. In the gathering, the players had walked through a presentation concerning the history of women’s cricket in India.

During the meeting, Mithali, along with veteran pacer Jhulan Goswami, presented Test jerseys to Indian players like Shafali Verma, Harmanpreet Kaur, Jemimah Rodrigues etc. – the pics of which shared by Jemimah on her social media.

In the pictures, Mithali was seen dawning her cricket pads which left many guessing as to why the senior Indian batter wore pads while giving jerseys to the rest of the team members.

In a chat with Sports Today, Mithali has revealed the reason behind doing so. The Jodhpur-born said she was training with the team’s batting coach ahead of the meeting and wanted to keep her pads on in order to get used to wearing them for long hours before the one-off Test against the English side.

“Usually, I am the odd person out. I was trying to change something in my setup. I wanted the batting coach to address it. And we were doing a session before the meeting. And once the meeting started, Ramesh (Powar) did tell me that I could remove my pads,” said Mithali.

“But I said ‘no, I want to get used to wearing the pads for longer hours. Let me go through the meeting wearing them’. So that was one of the reasons why I continued to wear that,” she added.

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