Last week I watched — for the first time — a women’s Test match between India and England. The competition was intense and in a curious way the players looked like throwbacks to the (male) Test teams of my youth when cricketers of every shape and size played the game with surpassing skill. Shafali Verma and Smriti Mandhana are the most exciting Indian opening bats I’ve seen since Sehwag retired. Remarkably, over many days of play, I didn’t once hear exclamations about forbidden congress with close female kin (or male kin for that matter). The absence of bearded faces continuously dropping F bombs was curiously restful.
There was real needle though. Katherine Brunt, England’s formidable fast bowler, had steam rising from her ears as Shafali Verma smacked her bowling back over her head for boundaries. Shafali is 17; Brunt began playing international cricket the same year this prodigy was born and she wasn’t amused. At peak-frustration, she stuck her tongue out at the young opener. In an all-women’s podcast hosted by the BBC called No Balls, Kate Cross, one of the English bowlers in this riveting Test, laughed about how she and her teammates cracked up on the field when Brunt began pulling faces at Shafali.
The ability to laugh at on-field standoffs when players regress to yah-boo confrontation doesn’t exist in men’s cricket. Not because male cricketers aren’t juvenile; we have just come to accept potty-mouthed machismo on the field as adult behaviour. The run-of-the-mill male cricketer behaves absurdly all the time, only it isn’t his tongue that he sticks out, metaphorically speaking. If you think toxic masculinity in men’s cricket isn’t real, you should watch high-class cricket played by women: the absence of strutting rage in these contests makes the very air relax and brings the cricket to a sharper focus.
Like most desi cricket followers, I knew women’s cricket existed without knowing much about it. If pressed, I could have dredged up the names of a few famous women cricketers like Shantha Rangaswamy and Diana Edulji from the pioneering past and Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami from the present, but I didn’t know their achievements and records in the way that I knew Kapil Dev’s career stats or Tendulkar’s or, for that matter, Shubman Gill’s.
This isn’t because their records aren’t accessible; they are easily available on cricket’s marvellous online databases. It’s the simple absence of live television coverage that stifles interest in the women’s game, not the quality of play. That and the fact that the Indian women’s team barely ever plays a Test match. The match in Bristol against the English team was the first Test that India had played in seven years!
The perverse result of this is that women’s cricket is devalued by its absence. The fact that it isn’t on our screens is taken to mean that it isn’t worth watching. There is no reason why I or anyone else should have been surprised by the quality of play on show in Bristol. We’ve watched Evonne Goolagong and Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams for decades, glued to our radios and then our television screens. Watching Shafali Verma hit a fast bowler for six is like watching Williams unload: it’s riveting. The difference is that you hardly ever get to watch Verma or Jhulan Goswami bat or bowl because they don’t play often enough and when they do, there’s often no commentary or television coverage.
Even when the stars align and the women’s team gets to play a Test against England in a pretty English setting, the powers-that-be schedule it for the same week as the final of the men’s World Test Championship! One reason why the Bristol Test attracted the television audience that it did was that the first day of the WTC was rained off. Some thwarted viewers began to watch the women play simply because it wasn’t raining in Bristol and there were players in white on screen going through the long game’s timeless motions. And then we were hooked.
I learnt that the Indian team was stuffed with players who were both Test debutantes and veteran India players. So Smriti Mandhana was a name to reckon with as an international cricketer and Shafali Verma was the top-ranked batter in the world in the T20 format. This was their first Test match because the last one was played seven years ago. Watching Shafali smash her way to 96 and then perish going for the big century hit in the style patented by the Great Sehwag, I couldn’t believe that the bean counters at the BCCI weren’t busy trying to turn her genius into money.
It’s worth noting here that unlike their male counterparts who managed to lose a severely rain-curtailed Test in three-and-a-half days, the Indian women, having been made to follow-on by a much more experienced English team, staged a rearguard action for the ages and saved the match. Sneh Rana and Taniya Bhatia were unbeaten on 80 and 44, respectively, when play was called off in the last hour of the match. This was their first Test and batting isn’t even their main skill: Rana is a bowling all-rounder while Bhatia is the team’s wicketkeeper. The team will play a hybrid tour made up of a Test and three T20 and ODI matches, with points assigned to each contest and a tally at the end to decide the winner. On the evidence of the first match of both tours, it’s clear which team will be more rewarding to follow; that would be the non-bearded lot whose on-field manner doesn’t suggest that sport is war minus the shooting.
One reason why women’s team sport, even when the team in question is a representative national team, doesn’t give off a rah-rah, drum-beating nationalist vibe is that modern team sport was historically organized around men’s bodies.
Most modern sport was institutionalized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The clubs, the rules, the regulatory bodies, the major tournaments were set up at that time. It was an unselfconsciously patriarchal time; women couldn’t vote in national elections in most Western countries before the end of the Great War, so it wasn’t surprising that athletes nominated to represent the nation in this new world of nation states were men by default. Nationalism and modern sport were, in their origins, ideologically male. Baron de Coubertin’s athletic beau idéal was an ancient Greek jock and the modern Games were meant to be festivals of fraternal brotherhood.
Eric Hobsbawm, the great British historian, summed up this connection between male team sport and modern nationalism brilliantly: “What has made sport so uniquely effective as a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events for males, is the ease with which even the least political or public individual can identify with the nation as symbolized by young persons excelling at what practically every man wants, or at one time in his life has wanted, to be good at. The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people [Emphasis added].”
In recent times, we have seen Indian cricket and Indian cricketers willingly assimilated into the politics of nationalism. Whether it was wearing fatigue caps on the field or acting as a twitter chorus for the Central government, India’s male cricketers encouraged us to think of them as nationalist mascots. Those of us who want to root for a desi team not made up of performative patriots should consider following and cheering the eleven named women who made us proud in Bristol. Tests without testosterone... now, there’s a thought.
