Why isn’t women’s cricket bowling the BCCI over?
The India team has proven its skill, over and over, but still gets barely any attention. What will it take to get the Board to care?
Just what will it take for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to take women’s cricket seriously? Making the final of the 2017 ODI World Cup didn’t do it. Making the 2020 T20 World Cup final didn’t either. Forcing a draw against England in a Test earlier this year, despite not having played a Test in seven years, did not spark a change.
Will their win in the third ODI in the ongoing tour of Australia do the trick? That was a landmark victory. It halted the longest winning streak in the history of cricket: 26 ODIS, going all the way back to 2018, by the finest team in women’s cricket by a mile, Australia.
It was also the biggest run chase (265) any team has pulled off against the Aussie women. There is now little doubt that the India women’s team is the second-best in the world after Australia.
The Australian team has got here on the back of the most robust, committed domestic system that exists right now. The India team is here more as a result of the sheer depth of talent and industry in the players than anything else.
Still, BCCI is not moved. Structural domestic issues that need long-term vision and deep engagement get no attention at all. As former India cricketer Snehal Pradhan wrote in a column for HT in July , there is urgent need of a nationwide Under-16 structure, including tournaments. As things stand, there is no structure and there are no tournaments.
There’s the question of money: the women are paid a dim shadow of what the men make.
And there is the baffling fact that India does not have a women’s T20 league. Australia has the roaring Women’s Big Bash League, England got the ingenious 100-ball format off the ground this year. Here, the women still have to contend with some incidental exhibition games on the sidelines of the Indian Premier League (IPL). This season, even that was quietly done away with as inconvenient in the pandemic.
All of which betrays BCCI’S lack of interest in the women’s game. But what truly shows them up is the way the national team is handled. With all due respect to Ramesh Powar, the team deserves a coach with a much higher profile. It would cost BCCI nothing to pick a truly accomplished, worldclass coach from among the many options available to them at home and abroad, if they had cared to look.
There is no support staff around Powar either. A spin-bowling coach and a fielding coach are appointed on a tour-by-tour basis. There is no fitness trainer, no physiotherapist, no analyst. If BCCI truly wanted the team to develop — and this is a team just a step away from being the world’s best — there would be a full support staff with a long-term mandate, in place.
None of this involves radical innovation. These facilities are simply the norm in men’s cricket. What it takes is a modicum of interest.
The most celebrated transformation on the India men’s cricket team has been the astonishing rise of fast-bowlers. Over the last decade or so, we’ve unlocked the secret to producing and nurturing pacers to the point where the men’s team can now boast of the deadliest fast bowling unit in the game.
The women have been given no access to this system. They still rely on the age-defying prowess of Jhulan Goswami, now 38 and in her 20th year as an international. What happens when she retires? Why does the women’s national team not have a fastbowling coach?
Even when it comes to basic fitness, the gap is yawning. Between Virat Kohli’s drive to lift the national team’s fitness levels and the IPL teams’ access to global best practices, it has become the norm for the India men’s cricket team to be world-class athletes. This helps with everything — fielding, bowling, batting.
It would be the simplest thing to put the elite group of women under a world-class fitness specialist and nutritionist and change their athletic profile too. The women’s hockey team did just that after they failed to win a single match at the 2016 Olympics, and it completely transformed the players, who are now as good in terms of fitness as any team in the world.
It would be the simplest thing if BCCI could get themselves to care, that is.