Women's Cricket in 2020: One step front, two steps back
It painted a grim picture of the world’s richest cricket body when both Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana, India’s T20I captain and vice-captain, admitted at the toss for the Women’s T20 Challenge final in November that they didn’t know when they would take the field next. That night in Sharjah was, in fact, only their third competitive game since collecting their silver medals in front of a packed MCG on March 8, when they stumbled in a tall chase against Australia in the T20 World Cup title clash.
In the nine months of inactivity that has followed since the COVID-19 pandemic took over the field of cricket, Mandhana has hosted more episodes of her lockdown talkshow with fellow India opener Jemimah Rodrigues than she’s taken guard. Meanwhile, even less fortunate players in another corner of the Asian subcontinent have resorted to selling fruit and other fresh produce from their family farms to raise funds and make ends meet.
This wasn’t the way that 2020 was supposed to pan out for women’s cricket. Not after a decade’s dedicated efforts and investments – financial and emotional – had ultimately led to Australia nearly delivering a record attendance for any women’s sporting event. But the night after two distinguished Perrys shared the MCG stage to celebrate a hard-earned peak for the women’s game, the novel Coronavirus brought it to a screeching halt.
Women’s cricket started falling off the non-existent Future Tours Programme. The frequent cancellations and rescheduling of events proved that some countries viewed it as expendable in the face of adversity. Only three bilateral series took place between that T20 finale in March and the end of the year. England’s men’s team alone played six series in their home summer. It is an example of how the men’s game has been prioritised, to the detriment of women’s cricket.
There are a number of reasons for this but the most significant is financial. The pandemic has hit the coffers of every national board hard. When facing up to significant losses, many boards have prioritised men’s fixtures to claw back as much revenue from broadcasters and sponsors as possible.
In May, Clare Connor, the ECB’s managing director of the women’s game, admitted that England’s men’s international programme would need to take precedence in order to plug as much of the expected financial shortfall as possible. Connor said that reducing the COVID-19 hit would ensure the ECB’s ambitious plans for women’s cricket over the next five years would be protected. It was short-term pain for long-term gain.
That is perhaps both the reality and understandable. But how much long-term damage might the short-term pain cause? And for how long will women’s cricket continue to be sidelined?
“Unfortunately for the women’s game, it has probably gone a little bit backwards this year,” Lisa Sthalekar, the former Australian all-rounder and ICC Hall of Famer, tells Cricbuzz. “It is sad because the sport, the players, the administrators and the national boards had invested heavily in the women’s game. We saw that in March at the T20 World Cup.
“We had over 86,000 come to the MCG. If you market it and promote it, people will come. It can be a money earner. The problem is that people will default back to what they know best. And what they know best isn’t sometimes the right thing for the global game. We have got to remember that it is a game for everyone. You can’t go back to the easiest option.”
India are one of the teams who have not played a game since COVID hit, a depressing fact given the opportunity which presented itself after India’s maiden appearance in a T20 World Cup final. Viewership for the Women’s T20 Challenge in UAE, which was the first outing for the country’s women cricketers after eight months in hibernation, more than doubled from the previous edition, proving the growing force of women’s cricket in India. Despite this, the national team has inexplicably been restricted to individual training schedules and personal media commitments.
BCCI pulled its team out of the proposed tri-series in England in September due to ‘logistical issues’, even though Cricbuzz understands the expenses of the tour were being borne by the hosts. This was at a time when male players and backroom staff were being mobilised from every nook and cranny of the country in preparation for a delayed IPL.
The two-week hard quarantine norm as laid out by the Sri Lankan health ministry led to the postponement of India’s tour in November, even though the players remain willing to embrace the ‘new normal’ of living the bio-bubble life. Through the BCCI grapevine there were murmurs of visits by South Africa and West Indies, but those fell through too. The Indian domestic season is subject to the men’s premier T20 competition in January proving the feasibility of bio-bubbles in a country where the COVID-19 caseload is in excess of 10 million.
Mithali Raj, who put off retirement by a year to focus on winning the ODI World Cup for India in 2022, admitted in an ICC symposium that national players were grappling with anxiety with no cricket in sight. “There’s been this anxiety about the future because right now we don’t know what we’re training for,” Raj said. “Before, we used to plan for any international series. But now we don’t know why we train. Sometimes we do feel there’s no sense of purpose.”
Countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even West Indies and South Africa to an extent, where the domestic structure isn’t as sound, are likely to meet the same fate, with the only hope being that these are only exceptions for an exceptional year.
While some of these nations might be able to tread water to an extent, what of those looking to break through in the ODI World Cup Qualifiers that were meant to take place in Sri Lanka? After a maiden T20 World Cup outing this year, Thailand had their plans for 50-over progress thwarted when the quadrangular ODI tournament that they had arranged with Ireland, Netherlands and Zimbabwe in April was wiped out by the pandemic. The tournament was supposed to get them in shape ahead of an early arrival in Sri Lanka for the qualifiers, which were put back by a year.
Now there is a strong possibility that they will go into the qualifiers in June and July – with potential ODI status and its guaranteed bilateral series on the line – without any international action beforehand. This would be a low blow for a board that has built a fully indigenous squad from scratch in a nation where cricket isn’t even a second-choice sport, and which was pouring every bit of funding into its team’s transition to a new format.
Some countries fared better, however. Australia again suggested that women’s cricket needn’t be compromised at the altar of profitability, committing to a full season of WBBL when sporting activity resumed – even if it had to switch to plan B at the eleventh hour. New Zealand and Pakistan put their women’s team in national training camps under respective new coaches as soon as it became feasible, before their domestic seasons were due to get underway.
At one stage, there were fears that no women’s cricket – international or domestic – would be played in the English summer. The picture gradually improved, however. While series against India and South Africa were cancelled, the West Indies stepped into the breach for a late summer T20 series, which England won convincingly. It was not the schedule originally intended but the importance of getting some women’s international cricket played was seen by the ECB as simply the right thing to do.
There was also domestic cricket in the form of a brand-new competition, the Rachael Heyhoe-Flint Trophy. Arguably, that was even more important for the long-term. “I definitely think the fact we had cricket and the RHF Trophy this summer will have kept girls in cricket,” Katie Levick, the Yorkshire and Northern Diamonds spinner, tells Cricbuzz.
“It was testament to the ECB for pushing so hard to get us some cricket. It would have been easy to go back on their commitment to the women’s game. It wasn’t even a case of reformatting an existing competition like the men’s. It was creating eight completely new teams and a new competition. It was great that the ECB worked to get us something this summer.”
The end of the year also saw the introduction of 41 new professional contracts awarded to domestic players. They were delayed from earlier in the summer but the importance of those contracts for growing the game in England cannot be underestimated. It showed the ECB are serious about women’s cricket despite the COVID-inflicted financial difficulties. The Hundred will get underway next year too. “Finally, a competition aligned with the guys to give us increased exposure. It can only be a good thing for us,” says Levick.
Globally, the outlook for the next 12 months doesn’t promise a whole lot though. With the ODI World Cup postponed by a year because of concerns about the disparity of preparation time between the competing nations, the temptation for boards will be to operate skeleton women’s schedules, internationally and domestically. “The concern I have now is that because there isn’t an ICC event in 2021, how much cricket is being put into the calendar in 2021?” Sthalekar says. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot at the moment.”
It is understood that India’s away tours to Australia and New Zealand, slated for January and February respectively, are set to be pushed back by a year. The likes of Bangladesh, West Indies and Sri Lanka have no confirmed series for 2021 at this stage. At least England’s women have some idea of their schedule. They are set to play in New Zealand early in the year and then host the White Ferns and South Africa during the summer.
While there is recognition that there will be medium to long-term impacts of COVID on funding, development programmes and salaries, the major concern for the next 12 months is that women’s cricket will continue to be shoved back to the margins. Retracing all of Australia’s efforts to put 86,174 in the stands once again has its challenges now in this post-COVID era. For now, earnest efforts to simply put teams on the park without having to justify if it is really necessary would suffice.
