BCCI’s (Women’s Cricket) Blind Spot

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BCCI Sleeping On Women’s Cricket Is A Lost Financial Opportunity

It is a facet of the Board of Control for Cricket (BCCI) in India's functioning that it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into doing the right thing. Equally true is that given the sheer volume of money and muscle at its disposal, even the little things it does when forced into it yield inordinate dividends.

These thoughts played in a loop in my mind this Sunday while I watched the Indian women's U-19 team win the ICC World Cup, for the second edition in succession, defeating finalists South Africa by a whopping nine-wicket margin. 

That margin of victory, achieved with 52 balls to spare against a team that had till then been undefeated in the tournament, tells you about the quality of India's next generation of women players. The team composition struck the perfect balance: two openers in G Trisha and G Kamalini, who were so dominant that they ranked first and third respectively in the list of top run-getters; two quick bowlers in VJ Joshitha and Shabnam Shakil who were adept at both-ways swing and seam movement and who invariably struck early to put the opposition on the back foot; and a troika of slow left arm orthodox spinners who proved irresistible right through the tournament. Vaishnavi Sharma, Aayushi Shukla and Parunika Sisodia ranked first, second and fourth in the list of top wicket-takers.

Long Overdue

That is a story of dominance that will take some equaling, and taken in totality it tells you that the next generation is ready even as the previous generation, led by the likes of Smriti Mandhana and Jemima Rodrigues, is only just nearing its peak. The question is, why did it take us so long? 

The year 2025 marks fifty years since the Indian women played their first international match (against the West Indies, in Mumbai). It invariably escapes our collective memory that the women participated in the World Cup, and finished runner-up, way back in 1978 — five years before the men's team had its breakout moment in 1983. And yet, the BCCI's attitude towards women's cricket, for the longest time, was to pretend it didn't exist. In fact, as relatively recently as 2011, then BCCI president N Srinivasan told former India star turned administrator Diana Eduljee:

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with Karunya Keshav, who co-authored The Fire Burns Blue, the definitive history of Indian women’s cricket, along with Sidhanta Patnaik. Karunya spoke of the progress of the women’s game as a series of accidents of fate, rather than the outcome of systematic planning. What if, for instance, Anurag Thakur had not run for the post of secretary in the BCCI elections of March 2015 and defeated incumbent Sanjay Patel—who, like Srinivasan before him, was no fan of women’s cricket—by a solitary vote?

Thakur, to his credit, had seen the possibilities that inhere in the women’s game and, in 2009 while serving as head of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association, had set up the first-ever residential cricket academy for women in Kangra town. It was during his tenure, first as secretary and then as board president, that he pushed the BCCI into playing a more proactive role in women’s cricket.

Even so, progress was slow and came only in fits and starts. Annesha Ghosh, who leads a very short list of journalists who have made following women’s cricket their life’s work, sees the post-2017 period as a sorry tale of missed opportunities. 

In that year's World Cup, the Indian women captured the public imagination. On July 20, captain Harmanpreet Kaur played one of the all-time great T20 innings, scoring 171 off 115 balls to power India to a semi-final win against a dominant Australian side, and though the team lost by a heart-breaking nine runs to England in the final, its stellar performances in the tournament saw the players elevated to rock star status.

“After that game, they were everywhere—on Vogue covers, in larger-than-life cutouts at Durga Puja pandals, in advertisements endorsing every conceivable product…,” Annesha reminded me, on a call a couple of years ago. 

“That is where the BCCI missed a trick—instead of riding that wave to raise the profile of the women’s game, they went to sleep. What got our women onto those hoardings, into those stratospheric heights, was their cricket—the skill and the verve with which they played the game—and that was allowed to lapse. For six months after that final, the team vanished from the public eye—they played no cricket at all.”

Horse And Cart In Right Order

The BCCI’s argument, when the commentariat talked up the potential of a Women's Premier League, was that there is little or no spectator interest in women’s cricket – this, despite the fact that several hardnosed franchises had expressed interest in bidding for women’s teams. Annesha, who has been ringside at almost every single game the women’s team has played, shot down that argument with facts.

“The response in the lower-tier cities has been phenomenal,” she pointed out back then. “I was there at Vadodara for the 2018 series against Australia. The evening before the game, crowds were thronging the gate, hoping to see the players as they came back from practice — and the game itself was played to a packed house. For the Women’s T20 Challenge tournament in Jaipur in 2020, there was almost no signage, no marketing — but still, the series played out to full houses at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium." PS, the T20 World Cup final of the 2020 edition between India and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground drew 86,174 spectators.

The crowds wanted more women's cricket; a half dozen franchises expressed their interest in buying teams in a potential WIPL, and yet the BCCI slumbered through six more years before it finally launched the women's franchise league in 2023. 

The problem, all these years, was that the BCCI put the cart before the horse — the governing body refused to invest in women's cricket until it could see a clear financial reason. Now the horse and cart are finally in the right order.

For instance, to prepare for this World Cup, the BCCI organised a triangular tournament in Pune featuring two Indian sides and South Africa — who, as it turned out, met India in the Cup final. The U-19 team also travelled to the World Cup venue, Kuala Lumpur, in December of last year to play in — and win — a U-19 Asia Cup. 

The team played the Asia Cup games at the Bayumeas Oval, the venue of its matches in the World Cup to follow. The upshot was that the team was well-prepared and familiar with both the potential opposition and the ground conditions.

The role of WIPL franchises in scouting and developing talent is equally worth pointing out. Three of the playing eleven in that final against South Africa are already part of various franchises -- G Kamalini plays for Mumbai Indians, captain Niki Prasad for Delhi Capitals, and Shabnam Shakil for the Gujarat Giants.

No Long-Term Plans

There has, clearly, been progress — and yet the cup remains half-full. The BCCI wants its teams to dominate, and so it plans well in the run-up to major tournaments, Karunya pointed out on that call. For instance, the BCCI had similarly prepared the U-19 women’s team for the inaugural World Cup in 2023. “That said, in terms of long-term vision the BCCI has none — there isn’t even a dedicated official within the board who is tasked with devising and implementing a five-year plan or a ten-year plan and held accountable for results. Long-term thinking is pretty much nonexistent.”

The BCCI, Karunya and Annesha agree, is a reactive rather than proactive body. An example is that in mid-December 2022, it instituted an under-15 tournament — a direct result of the ICC instituting an under-19 World Cup scheduled for the following year.

Prior to 2005, when the Women's Cricket Association of India ran the game, there was a clear pathway with tournaments at the under-16, under-19 and senior levels. Once the BCCI took over the administration of women's cricket in 2005, the under-16 tournament was scrapped, and so the post-2005 generation played only under-19s and then the senior level. The BCCI then brought in an under-23 tournament. It then added the under-15 but scrapped the under-23 — it is always give some, take some.

The problem with this is that match fitness, match awareness, the ability to withstand pressure, all comes from the number of competitive games you get to play. When there is no incremental age-group structure, you are left to the uncertain mercies of your own, or your coach’s, ability to organise games. Also, there is no defined school and collegiate cricket structure for women. So at age 17, for instance, there is a vast difference between the number of matches a girl has played versus how many a boy has played.

Lost Monetary Opportunities 

Ironically, given how the BCCI is driven by money, it is the financial opportunities inherent in women's cricket that the governing body continues to largely miss out on. 

“Promoting women’s sport is a box a lot of corporates want to tick right now because of the halo effect—companies want to be seen as caring for women and women’s sport, and the WIPL provides them with that opportunity," Karunya pointed out on that call. "Quite cynically, companies realise that they can get major brownie points by spending a fraction of the money it takes to advertise in the men’s game.”

All of this is relevant because the third edition of the WIPL begins next week — and it is the start of a runway that leads to the 2025 Women’s World Cup, to be played in India. With the snowballing interest this can generate, and with a marketing push by the BCCI, you could see houseful stadiums across the country for the 2025 Women’s WC. 

Imagine 100,000 spectators — the largest crowd ever for any women’s sporting event in history — filling the Ahmedabad stadium for the final. It sounds like an impractical dream, but think of it as a series of incremental steps and you can see a clear path to making that happen — and if it does, women’s cricket could become as hot a commercial property as the men’s version.

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