Australia leg-spinner Alana King has impressed one and all in her breakout year that keeps getting better. She had impactful debuts across formats and was part of the recent World Cup winning Aussie squad.
King was named in the Cricket Australia central contracts, which was followed by her addition to the ongoing Women’s T20 Challenge 2022. As the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is planning to stage a full-fledged Women’s Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2023, Alana picked Chennai Super Kings (CSK) as her favourite IPL side.
Notably, Alana’s parents, Leroy and Sharon, hail from Chennai and therefore, the country holds a special place in their hearts.
“Given both my parents are from Chennai and I have been following Chennai Super Kings from the inception of the IPL, yeah, be rude not for me to be asking Chennai to be my team of choice. Definitely, I will be trying to ask CSK to hopefully get a women’s team up and running, and yeah, that will be my team of choice for sure,” said Alana in an interview with India Today.
Despite having close roots in India, Alana can’t understand Tamil as her parents didn’t teach her and her brother Marc. But since the Victorian is plying her trades for Supernovas, her teammates have taken up the task to compensate and teach her how to count in Hindi.
“I know they (Indian cricketers) speak Hindi. I can’t obviously speak or understand Hindi, but girls are teaching me a few words, which is good. So hopefully, I can string a few words together in Hindi. They are actually teaching me how to count in Hindi. Harleen (Deol) is teaching me a little bit, so we will try to perfect that by the end of the tournament. My parents can speak Tamil, but they didn’t really teach my brother and I any Tamil, so I may know a few words but can’t understand it or speak it fluently,” Alana added.
