🇮🇳 Shafali Verma

Shafali Verma was born on 28 January 2004 in Rohtak, a Haryana district town with a population of around half a million. Her father Sanjeev Verma ran a small jewellery shop. Her brother Sahil played age-group cricket and Shafali, by all accounts, started copying him in the household courtyard with a tennis ball as soon as she could stand. By age nine she could hit a six over the neighbouring rooftop. Sanjeev Verma, after watching his daughter's batting style, made the unusual decision to enrol her in the Ram Narain Cricket Club's boys' section by cutting her hair short and dressing her as a boy named Sandeep. The deception lasted three years. By the time her gender was disclosed she had become the academy's top batter and the coaches kept her on regardless.

She was selected for the Haryana state under-19 team at 14. In 2019 she became, at 15 years and 285 days, the youngest woman ever to play Twenty20 international cricket for India — surpassing a record held since 1973. Her debut innings included a six off her second ball. In her fourth match — against the West Indies — she hit her first half-century. The British press, which had ignored women's cricket for decades, began featuring her on the back pages. The phrase 'Indian Sehwag' attached itself to her by her tenth international match. The comparison was apt for two reasons: her shotmaking style (a back-foot punch through cover that came down with the precision of a hammer) and her response to dot balls (she did not play them; she scored, or she got out trying).

The 2020 T20 World Cup at the MCG, in front of a crowd of 86,174 — the largest women's sports attendance in history at that point — was her global breakthrough. She opened the batting throughout the tournament and finished as the leading run scorer of the World Cup at age 16. India lost the final to Australia, but Shafali Verma's name had passed from cricket fan circles into mainstream Indian sport culture. Forbes named her one of Asia's 30 under 30 the following year. She was 17.

In January 2023 she captained the Indian under-19 women's team to the title at the inaugural ICC Under-19 Women's T20 World Cup in South Africa. India beat England in the final, with Shafali — opening, captain, set the field — taking 3 catches at midwicket. The trophy was India's first ever ICC women's title at any level. Indian cricket's gender gap narrowed by a measurable margin in the next 18 months: ticket sales for women's domestic cricket, for the first time, exceeded a certain commercial threshold. The Women's Premier League auction that month included Shafali Verma at the third-highest price band, despite her being 19.

Her style off the field is the inverse of her batting. She lives in a quiet flat in Rohtak with her parents, runs every morning at 5 a.m. with her brother, and reads, by her own admission, mostly Hindi-language novels by Premchand and Krishna Sobti. She has spoken in two notable interviews — one to BBC Hindi in 2023, one to Vogue India in 2024 — about the experience of having played as a boy as a child and what it taught her about the structural barriers Indian women athletes face. The Sehwag comparison, she says, she finds amusing but inaccurate. 'Sehwag-bhai had a different shape,' she said. 'I am made for a different cricket. I'll find out what kind.'

She is, in May 2026, 22 years old. She has played international cricket for seven years. She is now the senior India opener. She is the WPL captain of Delhi Capitals, with whom she has won one league title and lost one final. Her current career strike rate, across formats, is 138 — significantly higher than any female cricketer of her career stage in history. The Indian women's team is, by general agreement among coaches and analysts, building its 2025 World Cup campaign around her. If India wins, the Sehwag comparison will fade. A different one — historically female, structurally new — will take its place.