I Played Cricket. I Reported on Cricket. Here is How We Can Ensure More Women Do Both

By Anagha Rajadhyaksha

I’m a 90s kid. We grew up either loving sportsmen or Govinda. And to take that a step further I grew up with an older brother. As younger siblings would know, for the first 10-12 years of our life, our sole purpose of living is to get the attention, love, respect and TV remote from our older sibling. I was no different. But in order to become my brother’s best friend, I had to play (a lot) of sports with him. He would want to be Sachin Tendulkar and I would smear some Nivea cream on my face and become Alan Donald only to bowl to him for hours. From there began my relationship with India’s most loved topic, ‘Cricket.’

Pretty soon, I made the transition from “kacha limbu” to a player everyone wanted on his team in our society complex. I was the only girl taking on the boys, in a sport they believed they were born to play.

In 2001, I’d just finished my ICSE exams and found myself spending hours at the Bombay Gymkhana carrying every sport racquet that I own to get a good game – until I realised something pretty unusual was happening on the beautiful lawns that particular evening. There were about 20 cricketers having an extremely intense session at the nets. Why was it surprising? Well, they were all women. I walked up to them and asked if I could join? “This is the Mumbai Under-19 team,” I was told curtly. I persisted until I was given the ball – the first time I was even holding an actual cricket ball. I got my ‘Alan Donald’ mode on, rushed in and got a wicket on ball one (pretty filmi, yes!). After a good game with the team, I was asked if I would like to go for the “try-outs” for the “Nationals” in Jamshedpur, a couple of months away. I excitedly called my father to update him on the development. “There is a women’s cricket team?” was his first reaction. “Of course,” I said confidently, though 5 minutes earlier I was wondering why this team would need “try outs,” I mean are there more than 15 girls, under 19 years of age, who aspire to play cricket in the city?

I finally made it for the try-outs and before I knew I was the opening bowler for the Mumbai state team. At age 16, this was possibly the most important experience life could have given me. I became part of a world very different from the one I came from. And thanks to the lack of attention and coverage that Indian women sports gets, I didn’t even know this world existed. It was possibly the first time I felt embarrassed to live in South Bombay, study at St Xavier’s, have the luxury of a car and foreign holidays and I tried very hard to hide my Walkman. The world I grew up in was quite different from that of the rest of the girls who would catch the first local train and travel over an hour (sometimes two) to make it for net practice. I was certainly different from the girls for whom playing cricket was to be a means of livelihood and not just a game or an “activity”. Two weeks into being part of this world, I was handed over a big fat book of receipts with Rs 200 written on the top left. “What’s this?” I asked the team Manager. “The association needs money, begin collecting it from people you know, it’s just Rs 200 that they need to part with.” I had chosen to be part of this world, and thought it was something I needed to do for my new community – partly to help and mostly to belong! Neighbours, friends, family happily wrote off the money as a contribution to my budding cricket career, but in my mind this was just the tip of the iceberg when one talks about the state of women’s cricket & possibly women’s sport in India, in general.

We had a tournament in Chandigarh. 15 girls aged 16 to 19 travelled third class, on unreserved tickets and a journey that would take 52 hours. We slept in turns, three girls shared one seat and as we jostled for space and sleep, none of us realised that this was going to be our life along with all the men who kept trying to brush against us as we tried to make it to the toilets. By the time we reached Chandigarh, we were exhausted even just thinking of playing a full game of cricket in the blistering May heat. Fifteen of us were allotted a hall-sized room, of course we shared the bathrooms with the other teams, we were given 2 water bottles a day and food no athlete should be eating. The grounds we played on were small school maidans, where the rocky “outfield” was certainly not conducive to a game of cricket, or safety, for that matter. Men turned up to watch the game, not for the sport but because they got 30-odd women to ogle at will. God forbid you’d have to field at the boundary; it was difficult to decipher what the captain was trying to say to you, because the voices of men discussing you wouldn’t quite fade out.

The beauty of playing a sport you love is that through all this, the years of being part of the Mumbai state cricket team were one of my happiest. I learnt everything and more about the game from some of the best women in the game. The joy of victory, the shared pain of a close game lost, team bonding, dirty secrets and the happiness of a match-winning spell will possibly be unmatched. There was a hunger to win, healthy competition to make it to the playing 11 and a lot of hard work and dedication that went behind playing the sport – but the women’s team never got its due.

Gender dynamics that I never cared about growing up became acutely apparent to me. We had to play a practice game against an experienced men’s team. They fought and we fought harder and somewhere the cricket game turned into 11 women challenging 11 male egos. I say this confidently, since I was at the receiving end. One of their fastest and best bowlers began his run up from the boundary rope, bowled it fast, but only for me to play the ball off my pads, to the boundary. He was seething. It wasn’t about the boundary. It was about a girl hitting it. The next ball was rammed straight into my rib cage, he gave me a little grin and asked “girls don’t wear boob guards?” This is just one amongst the many incidents.

When I would tell people I met that I played professional cricket, reactions ranged from “so you girls play with a tennis ball?” to “means it’s under-arm stuff, na?” First this was entertaining, and then it got plain frustrating and demeaning.

I got an out. And I chose it. I was an above average student and I picked pursuing my education in one of the country’s best colleges over the chance of representing my state or who knows, even my country at some point in life. The faculty at college was extremely supportive of my choice to pursue the sport, as were my parents who never once wondered what would happen to the colour of my skin becoming 5 times darker by playing in the sun for 10 hours in a day. I had all the backing to pursue the game professionally but still didn’t. I had an alternative, a choice, an option, a luxury most of my teammates didn’t.

We live in a system where sports is still considered an “extra-curricular” activity and not part of the curriculum. What’s more worrying is that this is a system where women’s sports doesn’t feature on anybody’s radar – not the lawmakers, decision makers, sports associations, the advertisers or the media. The talent is out there, along with a lot of focus and determination; all it needs (or rather begs) is for some sort of support in the form of infrastructure and opportunity. A few years ago, I had the chance to associate myself with cricket again, but this time as a member of the media. I covered the World Cup of 2011 and the job description was pretty simple – follow team India wherever they go, with all access to the ground and players for interviews. To put this in perspective, sports channels by then had already tapped into the opportunity of getting a pretty face to “co-anchor” match preview shows in the hope of increasing eyeballs (on the game and the girl). Also, they made it quite apparent to all, that the girl was on TV for respite and not analysis! Given that context, not too many people expected to see a girl cover the game with real understanding of the nuances. And needless to say they were not good at hiding their shock. So nothing had changed then, women and sport in any combination, seemed too much to digest.

It’s been an interesting month with both our men and women teams playing the World T20. The India men’s team played Australia in a virtual quarter final at Mohali. A few hours earlier their female counterparts lost a close game to West Indies at the same venue, which also marked their exit from the tournament. While all the limelight that evening was on Virat Kohli, the camera very often panned towards India’s women team which was at the stadium cheering him on. Through this there were a couple of moments that stood out for me and also put into perspective where women’s cricket stands. Each time the girls saw themselves on the big screen, there was a shy giggle or a little jump in the seat, to have their 3 seconds of “fame.” To think, this talented bunch of girls are India’s national team, in a sport this country breathes, have on many occasions dominated the game at the world stage and yet remain completely unknown and out of the spotlight, despite their achievements.

Well, I presume, exposure and spotlight seems like a pretty farfetched expectation, where actually all that’s really needed is to get the basics in place.

1. Let’s make sports mainstream, part of the system, integral to the curriculum.

2. Let’s ensure better infrastructure, equal training facilities and more tournaments, because practice makes perfect.

3. Fair incentives backed by a good reward system to ensure that playing a sport is as much a career choice for a woman, as being a doctor.

Bollywood films like Chak De! India and Mary Kom throw light on the plight of women’s sport in the country & while Sania & Saina continue to make the country proud, the question we should be answering is how are we equipping ourselves to make more like them?

Here’s a plea to sports lovers, decision makers, lawmakers, sports associations and the like to act, encourage and support our sportswomen so as to ensure there are more out there representing us and fewer out here writing a piece on how they wish they could have!