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As the Indian women's cricket team became World Champions for the first time, the generations of cricketers who pick up the bat now, will have 16 female role models to look up to. (Express Photo by Narendra Vaskar)
Harmanpreet Kaur, India’s first ICC Women’s World Cup-winning captain, began her journey playing with boys and has gone on record in the past saying she had little to no clue about women’s cricket apart from hearing the name Mithali Raj. The story goes that Shafali Verma, the player of the match in the final, had to cut her hair short so that she can replace her brother in a tournament where she’d go on to shine. Deepti Sharma, player of the tournament, got into cricket by following her brother around because she was intrigued. Pratika Rawal, who was on the dias with her teammates on a wheelchair after an unfortunate injury, was the first girl to enrol at Rohtak Road Gymkhana. Richa Ghosh, Renuka Singh Thakur and countless other cricketers in the country over the past couple of decades started their journeys playing alongside boys.
On Sunday night, as the Indian women’s cricket team became World Champions for the first time, the generations of cricketers who pick up the bat now, will have 16 female role models to look up to.
Fight to make a mark
This World Cup has – perhaps rightly so – been seen as the 1983 moment for women’s cricket, even though Kapil Dev himself said before the final that comparisons are not necessary. But even without getting into the merits of comparing these monumental triumphs, that is bound to create a seismic impact on the game, the very near future will witness a boom in girls taking up cricket with a sureshot pathway ahead of them to make it a career, which wasn’t the case for pretty much any of the 16 members of this current team, who all had to fight through the system and desperately make their own opportunities.
In an interview with Nasser Hussain for Sky Sports earlier this year, Jemimah Rodrigues spoke about the changes she has seen even in the limited time she has been involved in the sport. Hussain asked: “If we went back to Saint Joseph’s school, your old school in Mumbai, would they have more opportunities, fewer barriers now than you did?”
Rodrigues replied, “A 100%. I recently went there. I make it a point to go back to my school just to remember where I came from and all the teachers who helped me, and to see so many girls out there. When I went back, everyone is a cricket fan, everyone follows women’s cricket. So many people back at home in the same club that I used to practise, where I was the only girl playing amongst 500 boys, now there is a special net only for girls. They play at a very competitive level, they have their own team and you can see so much growth. And it’s got to do with how women’s cricket has developed… the WPL, Hundred, WBBL. Everyone’s watching it, and they want a chance to play.”
If the women’s growth up until this point has been enough to see this much change, one can only imagine what the November triumph in Navi Mumbai can do.
This is also where those who run the game must take the right initiatives and not let this fizzle out. Mithali’s team making it to the final in 2017 brought multi-fold awareness to women’s cricket – far greater than what the former captain was used to in her career full of sacrifices. But in the months and years that followed, the game stagnated. The Indian team didn’t play another ODI for more than six months after the Lord’s defeat. Calls for making the most of such a memorable run by formulating plans for a women’s IPL-style league were constantly blackballed, citing a lack of depth. Even as recently as February 2022, there was resistance to scrapping the exhibition Women’s T20 Challenge and establishing a full-fledged league. It was getting to a point where foreign superstars were calling for one soon.
“To see the announcement of the IPL, in particular, to be able to grow the game in India is unbelievable,” Australia captain Alyssa Healy said during the 2022 ODI World Cup. “It’s such an untapped market I feel in the women’s game, with that many people. Surely, they’re going to be unbeatable in sort of a 10-year period. They just really needed a sort of a leg up in that domestic setup to showcase what these amazing women can do.” Soon after, New Zealand’s now-retired captain Sophie Devine said: “I echo Alyssa’s comments that as soon as that tournament happens, I’m going to be scared about what’s coming out of India.”
And lo and behold, in the first ODI World Cup that took place after WPL became a reality finally in 2023, India are the World Champions. It’s the sort of lesson Indian cricket administrators can learn and ensure that the investment in the women’s game goes up even further now, with better planning of tours, a full-fledged Under-19 and A program, and serious focus on grassroots cricket. At the very least, in a couple of World Cups from now, the journeys of players who are part of the squad don’t have the same origin story. They have bonafide heroes to look up to now.
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