Sports Cricket – Cricket – Women’s One Day International Series – England – India – The Spitfire Ground St Lawrence, Canterbury, UK – 21 September 2022 India’s Harmanpreet Kaur hits a six Action Images via /Andrew Boyers/

NEW DELHI, Feb 2 () – Women’s cricket looks set to emerge from the formidable shadow of the men’s game in India, with the rest of the world bracing for the birth of a sporting superpower.

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While male players have long enjoyed rock star status in the cricket-mad country, their female counterparts have had to fight hard to be taken seriously.

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But their struggle is finally starting to pay off, with a full women’s T20 tournament set to begin in March, 15 years after the Indian Premier League (IPL) began.

The Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) has raked in about $690 million in sales of franchises and media rights, and the revenue stream will increase further when a title sponsor is signed later this month.

India captain Harmanpreet Kaur has described the league as a “game changer” for women’s cricket in the country, citing growing enthusiasm for the women’s game among Indian fans.

This enthusiasm was evident in the host T20 series against Australia in December, where the tourists won 4-1.

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The opener at the DY Patil Stadium attracted over 25,000 spectators, while the second match at the same venue in suburban Mumbai attracted over 47,000.

While Australia has dominated women’s cricket for the past two decades, India already have a solid foundation and won the first Under-19 T20 World Cup in South Africa on Sunday.

“Women’s cricket may not be more popular in India than men’s cricket, but we can certainly hope to match them.”

For the rest of the cricketing world, excitement over the winning potential of the WPL’s top players is tempered by concerns about a replica of India’s already overwhelming strength in the men’s game.

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“There is a fear among many players that India will dominate world cricket when the women’s IPL starts,” Pune-born former Australian captain Lisa Sthalekar told Cricinfo.

“India will continue to take the lead in many initiatives related to women’s cricket,” Wasim Khan, ICC’s managing director of cricket, told the media on Wednesday.

“The values ​​brought in for these (WPL) teams reiterate how valuable and important women’s cricket is and how potential investors see it.”

Khan said that WPL will bring about the transformation of all-women games in the coming years.

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“We’re very confident that what happened in India was a catalyst to really try to take the game to even higher levels.”

Azeem Rafiq batting during the Specsavers County Championship match between Middlesex and Yorkshire at Lords on September 21, 2016. Photo: Dan Mullan/Getty Images

The harassment that Azeem Rafiq faced came in a game that has become increasingly white and more disconnected from modern Britain.

The racism experienced by cricketer Azeem Rafiq while playing for Yorkshire goes beyond the county and into the heart of the English game. This reflects the fact that, in stark contrast to football, cricket has worn a veil over racism for decades and diversity has become less, not less.

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Of course, there is a very Yorkshire-specific problem that explains why Rafiq’s team-mates and the club itself might have thought to call him the P-word as a dressing room joke. That wasn’t the only racist joke he was exposed to. While researching my book The Impossible Dream recently

Rafiq told me that his fellow Yorkshiremen had been calling him ‘the heretic Rafa’ for nearly two years. For Rafik, a practicing Muslim who went to Mecca for the pilgrimage, the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage for all Muslims, this meant he was an infidel and a devastating accusation. He was confused because none of those calling him “infidels” were Muslims and knew nothing about Islam.

What I didn’t know was that they were using the word “infidel” – not the Islamic “infidel”, but the term used in apartheid-era South Africa to demean black and brown people. Rafiq only discovered this when Yorkshire later launched an investigation into his allegations of racism. His reaction was: “Wow. How was this allowed to be my last name? These are not small-town boys. These are boys playing international cricket, traveling the world. They knew exactly what they were talking about. I had no idea.

Everything could have been different. With “God’s own country”, Yorkshire could set the standard in English cricket for being inclusive. For nearly half a century since the 1950s, immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as the Caribbean, have made Yorkshire their home. They played cricket but none made the Yorkshire team.

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During my visits to Yorkshire during the 1970s and 1980s, I heard two conflicting stories. White cricketers denied any racism and insisted that the reason the Yorkshire team was all white was because colored people were not playing for the right clubs, the clubs that traditionally form the cricket pool for the county team.

Asian cricketers told a story of denial and were so aggrieved that they formed their own club and even their own tournament, Quaid-e-Azam (named after Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah), which is still ongoing . Ironically, this meant that a version of the racial discrimination practiced by the Raj in India was recreated in Yorkshire.

Although British settlers had brought cricket to the subcontinent as part of their civilizing mission, they did not allow Indians on their teams: only people of pure European blood could play, although they would compete against other Native American teams. Finally, ten years before the end of the Raj, the British allowed a team of people of mixed blood, Indian Christians and Jews to be formed. The team was called The Rest, which is how the British in India see this all-round diverse team.

Now, in the wake of the Rafik scandal, almost the same stories of racial division that I heard 40 years ago have emerged. While Asian cricketers talk about still playing in purely Asian teams and not being selected for the country’s prestigious leagues, white cricketers still deny that there is racism. John Brooke, the 81-year-old white chairman of Lightcliffe Cricket Club, said in response to allegations of discrimination in Yorkshire cricket: “People can be abused inappropriately because they are fat or bald. I used to play in changing rooms where there was bullying, but it might have to do with people’s characteristics.”

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The fact that Brooke doesn’t understand the generational impact of racism, or that a black or brown person can’t change their skin color, shows that there is still a huge gap between communities when it comes to color.

It could be said that Yorkshire cricket has a particular problem of runs. It was only in 1992 that it fielded its first ethnic minority player, decades after other counties had done so, and in the teeth of opposition from some of its biggest players such as Fred Trueman, who thought it was “stupid”. And this cricketer was not born in Yorkshire, but Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest cricketers in India, an injured Australian Craig McDermott, who was brought in after the first selection. However, while other cricketing counties may not have the strict racial segregation of Yorkshire, the highest level of the English game has in recent years become the domain of more and more public school-educated players, and the opportunities for people of color have decreased considerably.

Although there were a few black players in the England squad in the 1980s and 1990s, now there is Jofra Archer, who only learned cricket in the West Indies, and the number of black players in county cricket has dropped by 75% since 1990. And despite Asians play a lot of recreational cricket, Moeen Ali was the only outstanding player to make the Test team in the last decade.

As a result, football, which was much whiter in the 70s and 80s, now represents the country much more on the pitch. Its impact can be seen in the way both white and black footballers kneel and join the campaign against racism. Such a bond between black and white is impossible in the cricket dressing room because there are very few colored people in the cricket dressing room. With this background, it is not surprising that a white Yorkshire cricketer calling his Asian team-mate the P-word was seen as a joke.

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This article was amended on 4 November 2021. John Brooke is 81, not 85 as an earlier version said. Wearing pads, gloves, and sometimes a helmet limits a player’s ability to evaporate sweat.