Women’s cricket was seeing an amazing rise in popularity after the uber-successful ICC World Cup 2017 and then ICC Women’s T20 World Cups in 2018 and 2020, the final of which saw more than 80,000 people filling the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
However, with the Coronavirus pandemic hitting the sport hard, Twitter was filled in with suggestions to alter the rules and playing conditions of women’s cricket in order to make it more audience-friendly and fast-paced. Some suggestions included an 18-yard pitch with smaller boundaries.
However, such suggestions didn’t sit well with cricketers themselves as Indian fast bowler Shikha Pandey called them ‘superfluous’.
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After a recent ICC webinar featuring New Zealand skipper Sophie Devine as well as Jemimah Rodrigues, Shikha, who has 114 wickets in 103 matches, said, “I have been reading/ hearing a lot about the changes being suggested to help grow women’s cricket/ make it a more attractive product. I personally feel most of the suggestions to be superfluous.”
“An Olympic 100m female sprinter doesn’t run 80m to win First place medal and clock the same timing as her male counterpart. “So the whole ‘decreasing the length of the pitch’ for whatever reasons seems dubious. Also, it almost definitely takes the doubleheaders out of question,” wrote the 31-year old Shikha, an officer serving in Indian Air Force.
“Please don’t bring the boundaries in! We have surprised you with our power-hitting in recent times, so remember, this is only the beginning; we will get better. Please have patience. We are skilled players, who are evolving,” Shikha appealed for patience.
Instead of bringing in such changes, Shikha asked for more investment in women’s cricket and called for steps to be taken to bring it at par with the men’s game.
“Growth can also be achieved by marketing the sport well. We don’t have to tinker with rules or the very fabric of the game to attract an audience. Why not have DRS, Snicko, Hotspot, all of the technical acumen and live broadcast for every game that we play anywhere in the world,” she said.
“Please, don’t compare women’s sport, women’s cricket, in this case, with men’s sport. We need to see it as a different sport altogether … A sport that 86,174 spectators turned up to watch on March 8, 2020, and several million watched live on their television sets,” Pandey said.
“They saw something special in us, and here’s hoping you do too,” she concluded with a hashtag “champions in our own rights”.
