Ranadeep Sadhu clearly remembers her daughter Titas Sadhu’s initiation to cricket.
A young Titas would spend her time reading the manual scoring sheets near the manual scoreboard in club level matches at the Rajendra Smirti Sangh Stadium owned by her family at Chinsurah, which is 40 km north of Kolkata. On Sunday, 18-year-old Titas wrote her name in golden letters as the pacer returned with figures of 4-0-6-2 to be adjudged player of the match in the final of the Under-19 Women’s World Cup. In the historic victory, it was Titas early wickets that helped India get early initiative in the final at Potchefstroom, South Africa.
“Since our family had built the stadium and academy in the memory of the family elder Rajendra Sadhu, Titas always spent her time at the ground. When the club matches happened, she would take her pencil and paper and would sit with the scorers studying the manual scoring sheets with utmost interest.
”That’s how her first tryst with cricket happened. To see her and the Indian team script history and win the inaugural U-19 World Cup Trophy is special for all of us,” Sadhu Sr told The Indian Express from Kolkata.
With her father being a state level athlete, a young Titas would also show keen interest in athletics and trained under her father’s coach Pinaki Karmakar. Apart from being part of the school’s sprint team, Titas was also playing football at the academy. Titas’s first lesson in cricket happened by chance thanks to her father. “She trained for athletics and was very fit and agile at a very young age.
She would also play football at the academy and accompanied my father Ahindra Kumar Sadhu to the academy daily. It was after 2-3 years that once during a holiday, I asked her to bowl the tennis ball targeting the goal posts from a distance. She did that with ease and that’s when I decided to train her as a fast bowler,” remembers Sadhu senior.