From second-class travel and rooming in dormitories to a TV rights deal worth more than Rupees 7 crores a game and high-profile ads promoting the team jersey, women’s cricket in India has enjoyed a dizzying rise over the past couple of decades. Two of its greatest names may have given up the sport recently, but as the bids worth hundreds of crores for the five franchises that will be part of the Women’s Indian Premier League (WIPL) showed, the future is unmistakably bright.
Here’s a quiz question for you. How many years has it been since an Indian team played in the final of a World Cup? We can guarantee that most people, even serious cricket fans, will answer nine, since ‘Indian team’ has been synonymous with the men’s side for as long as we can remember. But since the XI led by MS Dhoni fell to Sri Lanka in the T20 World Cup final in 2014, the women’s side has reached two summit clashes. After an agonising loss to England in the World Cup final of 2017, the women were beaten by Australia, the hosts, in front of a record crowd of 86,174 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in the T20 World Cup final in 2020.
Years from now, when we write the history of the women’s game in India, that 2017 World Cup will be viewed as the time when the sport was pushed from the periphery into the mainstream. It wasn’t as though the women had done nothing earlier. In fact, in comparison to the men, who didn’t make the semifinals in 1992, 1999 and 2007, the women’s side had been remarkably consistent, reaching the semifinals four times in succession between 1997 and 2009.
Defeated by the brilliance of Australia’s Karen Rolton in the 2005 final, they beat the girls in green and gold in the third-place playoff in 2009. They had also reached the semifinals of the first two T20 World Cups for women, in 2009 and 2010. Those tournaments were held alongside the men, and the team captained by Dhoni lost each of their six Super 8s matches.
The media coverage didn’t reflect the consistency of the performances though, or the fact that in Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami, India boasted of two of the titans of the sport. Newspapers seldom sent reporters to bilateral matches, and even coverage of the 2013 World Cup on home soil was a half-hearted affair with interest fizzling out after the team’s exit in the group stage.
When India played and beat England at the picturesque ground on the Getty Estate in Wormsley – their first Test match in eight years – the press pack was conspicuous by its absence. Every major newspaper and television channel had a correspondent in the UK covering the men’s Test series against England, but there wasn’t even token representation to witness a famous victory.
This apathy wasn’t restricted to India alone. At the T20 World Cup in 2012 in Sri Lanka, the ICC’s staff and volunteers would almost have to drag journalists into the post-game press conferences so that the players didn’t have the humiliating task of addressing just empty chairs. Not that it made a huge difference, with some of the scribes barely concealing their lack of interest.
The scenario hadn’t changed much when India hosted the event in 2016. Some journalists flat out refused to cover the women’s games being played before the late-evening matches featuring the men, while other reports were either poorly informed or lacking in any sort of genuine insight.
Often though, all it takes to change perceptions is one innings. If it was Kapil Dev’s 175 not out against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells in 1983, then the real game-changer for women’s cricket was Harmanpreet Kaur’s 115-ball 171 not out at the County Ground in Derby in the 2017 semifinal. That it came against Australia, winners of seven of the 12 World Cups contested so far, made it all the more special.
There was much cynicism about men’s cricket at the time, with a shock loss to Pakistan in the Champions Trophy final having been followed by an unseemly furore over Anil Kumble being replaced as coach by Ravi Shastri, allegedly at the behest of Virat Kohli. Harmanpreet’s innings for the ages and the heart-stopping manner of the nine-run defeat to England in the final flicked the narrative back to cricket, and the women’s game has seldom had to look back since.
With time, the tone of the coverage has also changed. Condescension has largely been replaced by understanding, and there are fewer annoying comparisons of female stars to their male counterparts. In a sense, there are parallels here with T20 cricket. When it was first envisaged and played, many cricket fans dismissed it as a hit-and-giggle sport, nothing like the ‘real thing’. Now, two decades on, there’s far greater acceptance that the T20 version is almost another sport in its own right, with a unique set of skills needed to excel.
Similarly, women’s cricket is no longer viewed through the prism of the men’s sport. It has its own niche, and the best players have a bouquet of skills that are eye-catching in their own way. The WIPL is merely the next step in this rapid evolution. For years, we were told that fans didn’t care for the women’s game. The attendance at the MCG in 2020 said otherwise, and was probably a real eye-opener even for some in the BCCI who thought the women’s sport didn’t have that sort of pulling power.
Despite the doomsday predictions when the men’s IPL began in 2008, the riches it has created for Indian cricket have played a huge part in the country now having a depth chart that’s second to none. These days, if there’s expectation that India should reach the final stages of every major tournament, it stems from the fact that there are so many talented players within the system.
When the IPL began in 2008, almost ever franchise had an Indian player in the playing XI who was ill-suited to the format. These days, even established stars have to sit on the bench at times, such is the depth. Women’s cricket fans will hope that the WIPL has a similar sort of impact. Having been carried by Mithali and Jhulan for the best part of two decades, with others like Harmanpreet also bearing a load, women’s cricket in India can now look forward to generations of stars. Australia and England may still be the standard-bearers when it comes to women’s cricket, but they have been warned. The future is here, and the Indian tigerss is ready to roar.