SHOULDER ARMS
Protea women cross the boundary
Cricket yelled loud and lurid from a television in a buzzing Pakistani-run barber’s shop on busy Bethnal Green Road in London’s East End this week. Live from Karachi in urgent Urdu, the lead sport story on Express News revealed all about movements up and down the International Cricket Council’s (ICC’s) rankings. The tale unfolded in slick scrolling stills of star players augmented by gaudy graphics and graphs. A woman’s voice bounced brightly, explaining it all, over hard-driven pop rock.
And in other news … Dull, soundless training footage appeared of the Pakistan team shuttling up and down a nondescript outfield. Cut to a short sound bite featuring one of them, uncaptioned. There were no graphics or graphs and no music, and the script was read off the teleprompter by the male news anchor — confirmation that the item wasn’t considered important enough to be, as television types say, “packaged”.
The first story was about male cricketers, the second about the Women’s World T20 (WWT20) under way in the Caribbean.
That a woman should be used to embellish — excellently, it sounded — the rankings piece and a man assigned what he clearly considered the chore of prattling passionlessly through the WWT20 story was lost in the electronic ether.
A good three minutes was devoted to the men. For the women, there was no wham, there was no bam, and it was thank you, ma’am, in maybe a minute and a half.
The only men’s international on the go at the time was the second Test between Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. In the preceding hours of the WWT20, England and SA had beaten Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Three matches had been played the day before, another was washed out, and two more would follow the next day.
Yet the nonsense of who was where in the rankings — no serious cricket person pays much heed to that gumph, which exists only to lure sponsors and help reporters out of a hole when they have nothing relevant to write about — was deemed worth telling before and better than what was happening at a world event.
Note the qualification in that event’s title. How come no-one talks, writes or broadcasts about the Men’s World T20, the Men’s World Cup, or men’s Test matches?
Express News hadn’t made an error of editorial judgment. Instead, it had given its viewers what they wanted and expected. Indeed, changing what is taken for granted as the natural order would likely spark outrage among the game’s core audience: people who think that the cricket worth watching is played by men only.
These people aren’t only men and they’re not only found in societies where women are born second-class citizens.
Mignon du Preez recalls bracing for
“what was supposed to be a press conference” before leaving for a previous edition of the WWT20 as SA’s captain.
“But there was nobody there, just me and Sipokazi [Sokanyile, the team’s media officer],” Du Preez said.
The problem isn’t confined to places where men make fire and women make salad, as former England cricketer Isa Guha explained in the Daily Telegraph: “I remember getting on the team bus to Lord’s on the day of the [2009] WWT20 final, just two months after [England won] the World Cup, when the men had already been knocked out and we were the only hope of lifting a trophy on home soil.
“Despite our recent success, it appeared that the general public were unaware our competition was even taking place. On the way to the match, I saw a pub promoting the men’s game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. We hadn’t even managed to garner a mention, even as the host nation.”
Eight years later, Lord’s was sold out for the women’s World Cup final. In the Long Room, Marylebone Cricket Club members in their baconand-egg ties saw a rousing contest in which England beat India by nine runs.
Hours afterwards, with England’s celebration in full, bubbly flow, this reporter posed for his one and only starstruck selfie with cricket’s finest bowler, bar none: the magnificent Anya Shrubsole, bender of time, space and the paths of cricket balls, who had taken six wickets in the final.
England had put SA out of the running in a semifinal that ended with another wonderful bowler, Marizanne Kapp, on her haunches in the middle of a suddenly desolate field, unable and unwilling to accept the truth of defeat and in her right not to do so.
It was cricket at its most watchable and visceral human drama, and the increasing focus on it is “worlds apart” from what Du Preez experienced earlier.
“This time, at the farewell at CSA’s [Cricket SA’s] head office [in Johannesburg on October 23], the amount of media who were there, we were blown away. It was really special to see all the people who were there for us. Everybody wants a bit of the something special that we have. We need to say thank you.
“We need the media to help build our brand. That’s what’s happening and we’re really fortunate. I want to say thank you to everybody for all the support.”
Some of this will sound insipid. But try to imagine Kevin Pietersen or David Warner thanking the press for doing their jobs. Or being grateful for support staff.
“It’s amazing to have all the hands on deck,” Du Preez said, and ticked them off like a kid listing Christmas gifts: “We’ve got a batting specialist! A bowling coach! Someone who does the fielding! A media person at hand! It definitely helps because we can concentrate on specifics, and it’s always good to get a different point of view. We’re very fortunate that CSA have invested in us and given us the resources.”
It’s a shiny new reality for SA’s women players, who until three years ago weren’t on CSA’s payroll. That they now are is thanks in no small part to the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA), the players’ trade union.
Even so, women’s retainers with CSA are worth, on average, a quarter of what men are paid. That must hurt?
“I don’t think we’re bothered that much,” Du Preez said. “The amount of work that
CSA and SACA have done to ensure that we get parity benefit has been amazing.
“We’re travelling business class. We’ve got single rooms. We’ve got a provident fund. We’ve got medical aid. All that is the same as the men. When we travel, our meal allowance and cellphone allowance are on par.
“We need to be realistic — there’s a lot more men playing the sport and they are bringing in the revenue.”
And it shows, what with women’s cricket routinely piggybacked onto the men’s game in sponsorship deals, and as curtain-raisers in front of stands that will fill up only hours later. Indeed, the current WWT20 is the first to be staged as a stand-alone tournament.
But, according to the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations’ “Women’s Global Employment Report and Survey”, released on October 24, only 120 women worldwide call cricket their profession — or almost three times fewer than the 317 registered professionals, regardless of gender, in SA alone.
Matters are improving. Australia’s top women players earned a minimum of A$40,000 (just shy of R415,000) at the beginning of the year.
Prolonged, at times bitter, negotiations saw that leap to A$72,076.
But even giants of women’s sport are less equal than men.
The 2017 Australian Open women’s tennis final and the women’s and men’s Big Bash League finals coincided. The television audience in Australia for the cricket peaked at 959,000, while 1.2-million tuned in to watch Serena Williams beat her sister
Venus.
Advantage women? Maybe not. The cover of the current issue of the US edition of GQ magazine features Serena Williams.
If you didn’t know what she does for a living, you wouldn’t have guessed from her longsleeved leotard, which bared her legs to the hip, neatly framing her crotch, and allowed her cleavage to pop through a peephole.
As if that wasn’t enough to make
Williams all about gender and nothing about what she has given the world, GQ billed her as their “Woman” of the Year.
That’s right. In quotes. Says it all.
It’s amazing to have all the hands on deck