TKR women draft Lanning, Rodrigues for 2024 WCPL

India middle-order batter Jemimah Rodrigues and former Australian captain Meg Lanning have been confirmed as two of the overseas players who will be representing Trinbago Knight Riders (TKR) women in the 2024 edition of the Massy Women's Caribbean Premier League (WCPL).

The 2024 WCPL will be played from August 21-29 at the Brian Lara Cricket Academy (BLCA) in Tarouba, Trinidad and it will be the third edition of the tourney. TKR won the inaugural competition in 2022, with Barbados Royals, led by West Indies women's captain Hayley Matthews, taking the 2023 title.

In a media release on July 7, TKR also announced the signings of Indian allrounder Shikha Pandey and Aussie spinner Jess Jonassen, and confirmed the five players they have retained ahead of the draft for the 2024 season. The five players TKR have retained are Shamila Connell, Zaida James, Kycia Knight, 16-year-old off-spinner Samara Ramnath and the destructive Deandra Dottin, who played a starring role in a 14-year career for the Windies women before her retirement in 2022.

Connell and James are currently part of the Windies women setup and they most recently featured in the team's tour to Sri Lanka, which concluded with a 2-1 win in the Twenty/20 series on June 28. Both James and Ramnath are currently leading their respective teams – TT and the Windward Islands – in the Cricket West Indies (CWI) Rising Stars Women's Under-19 Championships in Trinidad.

TKR will be aiming to bounce back from a disappointing 2023 WCPL campaign, which saw them finishing bottom of the three-team table.

In the quartet of Jonassen, Lanning, Rodrigues and Pandey, TKR will be acquiring a wealth of experience, as all have represented their nations in Test cricket, one-day cricket and the Twenty/20 format. Both Jonassen and Lanning have represented Australia over 200 times, with Pandey and Rodrigues amassing over 100 appearances across the three formats for India. Rodrigues is 19th on the International Cricket Council rankings for T20 batters, with Jonassen ranked 14th among ODI allrounders.

There are six more spots to be filled by TKR to reach their 15-player quota, which will be done via this month's draft.

The TKR squad before the WCPL draft:

Shamila Connell, Deandra Dottin, Zaida James, Kycia Knight, Jess Jonassen, Meg Lanning, Shikha Pandey, Samara Ramnath, Jemimah Rodrigues.