HOW LAUREN BELL BECAME ONE OF ENGLAND’S MOST POPULAR CRICKETERS
Hair toss, check my nails.
Lizzo, the American pop star, is unlikely to be thinking about cricket when she belts out those lyrics, but they are rather fitting for Lauren Bell. Like many of the sport’s newest names, Bell showcases style as well as substance.
“We’re more than just a cricketer that you see on screen,” says Bell, as her perfectly manicured red and gold nails catch the eye.
“It’s very important,” she tells Telegraph Sport with a laugh when I ask about the choice of colours to match her Women’s Premier League franchise, Royal Challengers Bangalore. “You can’t really choose your outfit, but you can do your hair and your nails.”
While there are limited opportunities to express yourself sartorially on the pitch given the constraints of cricket kit, RCB players were given the opportunity to show off their style at their own Met Gala-inspired red carpet event recently. It may not have matched the glamour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual fund-raiser on the first Monday of May, but it was still a spectacle.
“It was fun,” Bell explains. “We had a stylist come in and we tried on loads of outfits, chose our dresses, got our hair and make-up done. There was a whole red carpet, interviews, awards; it was the full shebang.”
Even without black-tie awards nights, franchise cricket in India is on a different level to the rest of the world. It is a country where cricket is a part of the national culture in a way the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) could only dream of, and the viewing figures for the WPL reach the hundreds of millions. It is also the most lucrative and the most coveted women’s franchise league in the world, although success for overseas players is not always a given.
Bell was signed by UP Warriorz for the 2024 and 2025 editions of the WPL, but had to wait until this year, with a new team, to make her debut in the competition – and since then she has not looked back.
Social media is not the only marker of an athlete’s popularity, but there is an undeniable correlation between Bell signing for RCB and her Instagram following exploding. At the time of the WPL auction in November, she had 750,000 followers; heading into Thursday’s tournament final she had two million and after her team’s triumph had added another 100,000.
In fact, only two English cricketers, Ben Stokes and Jos Buttler, have more followers on the platform than Bell, and they have both captained the national side. Bell has hundreds of thousands more followers than Joe Root, one of England’s greatest, and she is a long way clear of Danni Wyatt-Hodge, the second most-followed England women’s cricketer with 320,000.
“It has been crazy,” Bell says. “The support that RCB have as a franchise and how they’ve taken me in and welcomed me and supported me as part of the big extended franchise, it’s been great. Having support is lovely.”
There was attention on her immediately after the auction, with one fan online dubbing her the “most beautiful cricketer”, but it is clear her sporting talent has won over the fans. Before the final she boasts the best economy rate for a seamer in the league of 5.62, having taken 12 wickets at an average of 15.
Gargi Raut, an Indian sports journalist for Rev Sportz, says: “RCB has one of the largest and passionate fan bases; she’s earned the trust of the fans with her performances, and her social media presence adds to the appeal.
“Above all she has something that Indian cricket culture has always admired – a fast bowler who looks like she can be capable of succeeding in any conditions.
“You can often gauge a player’s popularity by how many reels are doing the rounds, and Lauren has plenty. Her yorkers, old-fashioned bounce and ability to bowl tight overs have caught the imagination of hundreds of fan pages online. Add to that the passion of RCB’s fan base, and she’s clearly benefiting from that ecosystem.”
RCB have capitalised on Bell’s social media popularity by featuring her heavily on the club’s own channels, including some AI-generated images, like her playing guitar or with trees popping up around her – her 116 dot balls in the WPL also mean she has contributed to thousands of new trees (sponsors Tata Group agreed to plant 500 trees for every dot ball in this year’s WPL).
It is not always easy to cultivate engagement on social media, but Bell is keen to give fans a glimpse into aspects of life as a touring cricketer, and embracing all it has to offer.
“One thing I’m passionate about is trying to show my personality as well as being a cricketer and social media is one of the best platforms to be able to do that,” she says.
“It’s really important for getting young girls to see what it [tour] is really like. I am quite passionate in trying to show that you don’t need to be a certain way or do certain things, to play cricket or be successful.
“When used the right way, social media is one of those platforms where it can really show off you as a person and what you’re interested in.”
Life on tour is often hard to explain to those who have never experienced a cycle of hotel rooms, near-constant travel and late-night matches, especially in the subcontinent where there are often more limited opportunities to get out and about.
“None of my friends understand it [tour life],” Bell says. “It’s not a normal working day. It’s a lot of socialising or it’s a hotel room or going out for dinner.”
While millions of people follow her life playing cricket across the globe, her father, Andy, remains her No 1 fan. He is an engineer who professes to be “not a very good cricketer”, but has followed his daughter around the world and was at the WPL final, which Bell’s team won by six wickets, with two balls remaining.
“There’s no way he would miss it,” Bell says. “I’m surprised he hasn’t done this whole tournament, he normally doesn’t miss a game, but he’s coming.
“I really want him to experience it because it’s not like any cricket I’ve played before with the support and the crowds. You never know with cricket how much you’re going to experience, so I told him he needed to come and at least experience it once.”
Having been there for all her career developments, including when she was deciding between playing football for Reading or becoming a professional cricketer, her father is now seeing the benefits of Bell choosing to change her bowling action.
“I wasn’t the best bowler in the world and I want to become one of the best seamers in the world,” she says honestly.
Bell was already playing for England and performing well when she decided to tinker with the action that had guided her to that point – and undertaking the change during a single season in 2024 took a serious amount of work.
“I’m a completely different bowler,” she explains. “There’s three big things for bowling pace: movement in the air, pace and bounce. My new action provides me with more pace, bounce and I move the ball away, but it will allow me to move the ball in as well.
“I think all three aspects [are better] and from an injury prevention point of view, I’m playing with no pain and before I fell away a lot and had niggly back pain all the time.”
As she impresses with the ball in hand for RCB, there is no denying how positive the change has been.
A breakout WPL season could not have come at a better time for Bell, or England, with a T20 World Cup on the horizon. Charlotte Edwards’s side have the chance to repeat the feat of 2017 and claim an international cricket trophy at Lord’s this summer, and Bell – having been in the stands nine years ago – wants to be a part of it.
“I’m super excited,” she says. “We’re just so lucky that we’ve got a home World Cup in my career. It’s a massive opportunity for us as a country and for women’s cricket in England. We need to get there first and get selected, but hopefully I can be a really big part of it and try to promote it, play some really big cricket and all the stuff around cricket. It’s a super exciting opportunity.”
Success this summer would likely lead to another explosion of Instagram followers, too.
2026-02-05T07:05:46Z