Howzzat for fair share?

Our girls in cricket have the passion, power, and perseverance. All they need now is honing and hand-holding out of the humdrum. Time for sports administrators and popular mindsets to take their guard, says MEENAKSHI RAO

It was 2012. Mithali Raj was captaining India in an away series in England. The England Cricket Board (ECB) was in the process of taking out a pre-tournament guide with player information. Sachin Tendulkar happened to be in his favourite haunt London around that time. Asked by the ECB to comment on Mithali’s contribution to women’s cricket for a note on her in the booklet, the legend simply said: “Mithali is one of those cricketers who have achieved so much but she has not got what she deserves.”

Tendulkar may have been talking about Mithali at that time but his opinion encapsulates the state of women’s cricket in India, and to a certain extent worldwide too. It’s been largely unsung, unwatched, unsponsored, ignored by the game’s administrators, derided and mocked at as a fringe element in a totally male domain.

Dainty and not-so-dainty women rubbing the ball on their crotch, throwing themselves at the boundary in an ungainly manner and trying to look ferocious in the run-up is not a sight they wanted to see or applaud. Glamour sports like tennis, badminton and swimming were more up their sleeve. Women cricketers lacked the zing. Moreover, the game looked genetically slower in the female section. The derision notwithstanding, the women cricketers have carried on, undaunted till today — when a World Cup Final finally brought in the long awaited attention these girls needed.

From Shantha Rangaswamy, the first woman skipper of Team India who finally got a Lifetime Achievement Award from the BCCI just when she turned 63 this year, to Diana Iduljee, who came on to the post-Lodha BCCI Committee of Administrators as the lone woman candidate to set things right with the cricket board, to now Mithali, who has led India to two World Cup Finals — the doughty warriors have battled issues and neglect, not to mention crippling isolation, while taking the game to a fair share of recognition.

The strides have been small but strong. Starting off as an unorganised sport with a bunch of girls finding their way on to the 22-yard strip as sisters or daughters of the men in their families, playing two-bit tourneys over a period which got somewhat organised over a period of five decades, they finally got on to the BCCI rolls after Sharad Pawar pitched for their pensions and Anurag Thakur gave them centralised player contracts in 2015, nine years after the men’s team got them.

The BCCI may be the richest cricketing board in the world but it gave its women team salary recognition much after seven other, much lesser cricketing nations had done it. The BCCI took over the reins of women’s cricket from the Women’s Cricket Association in 2006. So it was shocking to hear Rangaswamy mentioning that the Lifetime Achievement Award was her first-ever monetary earning from the sport! All her playing day expenses came from her pocket and the girls she led also paid through their nose for the passion of the game they played.

In Mithali’s era, things are better resourced around women’s cricket as compared to Rangaswamy’s time when the team of girls had to brave non-reservation travel in crowded trains, sitting the night out next to smelly toilets, to get to their match venues and would mostly buy their own equipment. “I am happy for the present lot. Mostly, they fly and get decent accommodation. We slept in unreserved compartments near the toilets. I am proud that all of us still did it and never let our passion for the game dim,” says Rangaswamy.

Sadly, decades down the line, the focus is still on silly point. No wonder, the live telecast of the Women’s World Cup 2017 Final between India and England was largely uninterrupted by frenzied advertisers. The jerseys of our Women in Blue were not dwarfed by sponsor logos. And the Women’s World Cup qualifiers, slotted by the International Cricket Council (ICC) as preludes to the games within the Men’s Cricket World Cup, saw very low attendance and media reportage, a bulk of the reporting being left by accredited journalists to wire agencies despite being in the stadium to watch and report the men’s matches that would follow a women’s clash.

Mithali puts all this disdain down to not just the BCCI being slow on the recognition, but to the general culture of India. “India is still not a sporting nation. Sport here follows a herd mentality. If badminton is happening because of Saina, there will be a horde of girls joining that sport. If Sania has brought in the laurels in tennis, there will be an influx into that sport. There is no sustained professional sporting culture, no sports curriculum in schools, no parental push towards any sport, least of all cricket. We need to change our mindset towards sports in general, not just for women’s cricket,” she says on her return from England.

Mithali has a point. Most of the bunch of girls she led to an epochal run in England — where history cruelly defeated her by just nine runs, underexposure of her girls and panic on the big stage — come from humble backgrounds with cricket not really happening in their homes or surrounds.

Take the case of Ekta Bisht, the 31-year-old who single-handedly destroyed Pakistan in the run-up to the Final with her 5 for 19 in a game that India had scored barely 169. She started off playing cricket at age three in the nondescript village of Deoli near Almora. “She just went along with her elder brother and the other boys. Gharelu cricket kheltey thhe ye bachchey,” her unassuming mother Tara says over the phone.

Cricket has never been a game for girls in Deoli, but today Ekta is Uttarakhand’s much feted daughter. She had to sit out of the 2017 WWC Final but her contribution in the campaign got her laurels and a promotion in the Railways where she works as a clerk in Kanpur. Ekta won her first tournament at age five and that’s when her father, an Army veteran, decided his daughter would pursue her career in cricket. “Pehle cricket ka chalan nahi thha, but coach Liaqat Ali Khan spotted her talent and groomed her,” Tara says. “Chhota sa, toota phoota stadium hai yahan where she practised. When boys play here, the ball keeps falling into the houses down below,” she adds with a laugh.

Of the five crucial wickets Ekta took in the game against Pakistan, three were of the top-order, all gone for single digit scores, all rapped on the pad in LBW. Quite a floater this one. Of her 68 wickets, 29 have been bowled or LBW. She returned to claim two more in her second spell, assuring Pakistan never got anywhere  near India’s meager total of 169.

Her Hi5 performance won her the Player of the Match Award and accolades from her skipper. “Ekta has delivered time and again for India when given the new ball. I’m very proud of her. Her spell was so crucial; the wickets that we got for the first spell brought us back into the contest,” Mithali acknowledged after the match. So much for this Commerce post-grad, who was playing her second World Cup and plans to continue with cricket for another five to six years.

Her mother, a sheltered housewife otherwise, talks cricket with knowledge and opinion. She has on her fingertips all the stats of her daughter, as also of other players, and she is in no hurry to marry Ekta off despite age mounting in societal mindsets of the region where the family lives. Eking out a living from a tent house business, a roadside dhaba that has since closed down and now a relative’s PCO, the family encapsulates the change that is coming over India even though in small measure.

When Mithali was seven, she was forcefully taken to the stadium where her brother was being coached. The coach asked her to bowl with a tennis ball and she turned her arm like the boys, albeit with a little more force. After playing for four to five years, the same coach took her to the Kasturba College for league matches and there has been no looking back.

Rangaswamy candidly asserts that though Mithali is a dogged cricketer whose captaincy took some time to mature, she sees a vast improvement in the props around women cricketers today. “A beginning has been made. Women’s cricket has grown but it can grow much more. This is the time for the BCCI to strike when the game is hot. We still do not have a base wide enough to call women’s cricket a popular sport. They can make it popular by going to the grassroots levels. They need to tap and nurture talent through inter-school, inter-college and inter-universities tournaments,” she says.

Surprisingly, the 70s and 80s of Rangaswamy’s times, under-16 tourneys were a regular show and university cricket was of a very high level, “but it has trickled away today. The South Zone continues with the under-16 tournaments but the BCCI needs to make it mandatory for all zones”, she says.

What is Rangaswamy’s recipe for making women’s cricket special for the nation? “Replenishment and increasing the standards of competition in domestic cricket are the key,” she says, an opinion which skipper Mithali echoes in no unequal terms.

Today, women cricketers get a measly Rs 2,500 a day for domestic tournaments, which are few and far between. For under-19, it is only Rs 1,250 per day! “There is an inability to meet the costs of travelling, boarding and lodging. What is Rs 2,500 in today’s cost of living? The BCCI should come out of their conservatism and look at women’s cricket afresh,” Rangaswamy says.

Indeed, concentrating on just 25-30 girls to make them excellent cricketers is a short-term measure. The need is to train over a 1,000 girls as bench strength.

One must note here that Mithali and Jhulan Goswami are not the creation of the BCCI. They struggled and made themselves what they are with their own passion and pockets. Harmanpreet Kaur, the Haryana girl who smashed a scintillating 171 to oust the defending champions from the WWC, had a man-like surety with the bat only because as a key player in the Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) initiated by Australia, she has earned experience and exposure on the international stage, props that are urgently required to get the other equally talented girls going in the game.

“For now, only Smriti Mandhana and I play WBBL. Other players of our team need to play in such tournaments to improve their game and experience. If our Board creates an IPL for women, players from other countries will come here and play alongside us and share dressing-rooms. That will increase our confidence,” Kaur reiterates. For now, Kaur will be going to England to play the T20 league but not many of her friends in cricket will get the same opportunity. With the upcoming T20 WWC in New Zealand, such exposure is a must to avoid the incidents of the first round exit as it happened in our home World Cup in 2013.

Time to wonder then why a cricketing board like the BCCI, which ushered club cricket into the gentleman’s game with the highly lucrative and popular IPL, did not — and still does not — think of a women’s IPL. There are enough funds with it being the richest Board in the sport and there has always been a sound Indian women’s cricket team raring to go.

“Today, we have meagre bench strength of 25-30 girls, most of them on the verge of calling it a day. If at least 1,000 players are ready to take on the mantle, it would be better,” Rangaswamy says.

But the sad reality is many will fall by the wayside amid administrative neglect. After all, it is an expensive game. The more the girls play, the better they will get. As monetary benefits are too low, the girls may get lured away with short-term gains in other careers, feels Mithali.

Is there a financial crunch in the BCCI, Rangaswamy asks? “There’s no crunch of passion in the girls,” she points out. “If performance is the criteria, we are as good as foreign teams. We beat SA, we beat England, we beat Australia. But I think the system in place in those countries is far better. There’s more structure, more support staff. That’s why I say the BCCI can do a lot more. We started men’s IPL. We let the initiative slip away from us in the women’s section. The WBBL has started. England has started it too. Why are we lagging? Women’s cricket is a part of the BCCI. There can’t be a different yardstick for women,” she adds.

Today, women’s cricket is supported mainly by the Railways, which give the girls a job to get a regular pay while they play and practise for 330 days a year and are not required to attend office in that period. Kaur did not even get that prop from her State Government despite a repeated high performance index and it is only now that she will be getting recognition and a police job from a shame-faced administration.

And sometimes, appreciation comes in other forms. For instance, Mithali was recently gifted a BMW by the Telangana Badminton Association Vice-President, V Chamundeswarinath, for becoming the highest run-getter in the women’s ODIs. The car was presented to the cricketer at the Pullela Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad.

Mithali. Harmanpreet. Deepti. Shikha or Smriti. From 30 plus to just 19, there’s a lot to nurture in women’s cricket. Now is the time, now is the date to hone the present to create history for the future. Howzzat for a fair share? 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, Agenda, 6 August, 2017