A comprehensive review of Women’s cricket in India
How far has Women’s cricket come in India, and how permanent is the growth?
This report would not have been possible without a few vital collaborators. Bhuvi Mukesh, Anmol Kakkar & Preetham C conducted the fan survey, while Pranav Nair (@leg_gully) interviewed folks who attended matches during the 2024 India-South Africa series.
In February 2016, a young reporter named Purnima Malhotra1 landed in Ranchi, excited for one of her first on-ground assignments with Cricbuzz. Female journalists in cricket newsrooms are rare, but if she could get a couple of player interviews, maybe she could make a name for herself.
When Malhotra got to the stadium, it didn’t feel like a Team India match, let alone a warm up game before a home World Cup. [That’s right, India hosted the Men’s and Women’s T20 World Cups simultaneously in 2016. I honestly had no idea.]
Anyway, back to Ranchi. There was not a single other reporter at the nets session, and the liaison officer was surprised that someone from out of town had actually made the trip. Malhotra ended up having to cover the match from the stands because the press box was locked, and the end-of-series press conference was disrupted by the celebratory noises of a wedding reception in the adjoining sports complex!
The Indian Women’s head coach, Purnima Rau, turned out to be Malhotra’s biggest ally. The two Purnimas realised that they could salvage the situation by setting up interviews with almost every player of the squad to get the team some exposure. It’s hard to say if it made much of a difference in the moment, but it was an attempt to create opportunity out of isolation.
You could argue that it’s a challenge that still faces Women’s cricket. The BCCI may have sold the Women’s Premier League (WPL) franchises for $572 million and the media rights for $110 million, but these are hopeful valuations for a bright future. The “opportunity”.
But, for decades, the Women’s team has been ignored in India. Sometimes, it has been worse than that. Back in 2016, due to a dispute with the BCCI, Chennai were not given any Men’s World Cup games to host. Instead, they were given games from the Women’s World Cup.
It’s an “insult” that apparently still rankles in the halls of the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, and one that has not helped attitudes towards Women’s cricket in the region. Chennai would not host a single national Women’s game again for eight long years. The “isolation”.
Which brings us neatly to June 2024. And, a slightly different reception for the Women’s game in Chennai.
The Test match between India and South Africa drew thousands of fans to the stadium, with millions more watching online. Additionally, the press box was unlocked this time, and there were six female reporters in attendance - the most ever at a game in India.
But, is this a consequence of real growth, or just a flash in the pan? How far has Women’s cricket been able to realise its “opportunity”?
How have Indians learnt about Women’s cricket?
The 2016 Women’s World Cup was a cricketing (and therefore commercial) failure for India. The non-India games were barely televised, and it didn’t help that the Indian team crashed and burned with losses against Pakistan, England & West Indies. But, things were going to turn a corner real quick.
During the 2017 ODI World Cup, India captain Harmanpreet Kaur broke into the mainstream cricket consciousness with a 171-run innings from just 115 balls. Against Australia. In the semifinal.
That would be the first of multiple high profile matches that Kaur would lead India to in the next half decade, including World Cup semifinals in 2018 & 2023 and another final in 2020. It was a run of success that demanded attention from the cricket-watching public in India. There is a way to go, but clutch performers like Kaur, Smriti Mandhana and Jemimah Rodrigues have started to become well-known2.
Cricbuzz’s Purnima Malhotra, that lone reporter in Ranchi, realised Women’s cricket was more popular than it seemed after India’s acrimonious loss in the 2018 World Cup semifinal. That campaign was marred by ugly in-fighting between the Indian players, and even leaked letters to the BCCI.
In years past, the loss would have either been ignored or been treated with condescension. But, in 2018, Malhotra was surprised to see that the online discussion between fans was nuanced, focussed on the merits of each player’s arguments, and showed an unprecedented level of public interest and knowledge on the Women’s team.
Soon enough, these small pockets of interest would coalesce in a moment that was too big to be ignored. In early 2020, Australia hosted the T20 World Cup. As perennial champions, the hosts made it to the final where they faced Kaur’s India.
The Aussies would win (as they always seem to do, regardless of gender) but that’s not what made the game special. The final was played at the historic Melbourne Cricket Ground, and it was packed. 86,174 people came to watch a Women’s cricket match. That’s the second highest total for any Women’s sporting event in history.
Suddenly, the opportunity became clear. The Hundred & the WPL were set up as high profile, for-profit Women’s franchise leagues, cricket associations were tripping over each other to promote policies that supported the Women’s game, and Women’s matches became more frequent at the domestic and national level.
Are Indians fans going for Women’s matches?
The India series against South Africa in June-July 2024 made headlines for the packed stands during the ODIs and T20s. The white ball matches saw 12,000-15,000 fans for each game, while the Test match attracted between 5,000-7,000 fans per day (on a weekend when the India Men’s team were also playing in the T20 World Cup final).
But, here’s the funny thing. Women’s games have been well attended for a few years. When Australia played India in 2018, grounds were filled in Baroda. Similarly, the Women’s T20 Challenge in 2019 (a three-team experimental precursor of the WPL) saw full stands in Jaipur for the final. In 2022, during an Australia Women’s tour of India, the T20 matches saw 46,000-plus fans pack out the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai.
The WPL has seen this trend accelerate. The finals in both 2023 and 2024 have been sold out, with reported audiences of more than 28,000 each. More impressively, during the first half of the 2024 group stage in Bengaluru, fans filled out the 33,800-seater Chinnaswamy stadium in multiple games (including all the RCB games). That’s a huge jump from the optimistically reported average attendance of 13,000 in 2023.
What’s been different about the 2024 South Africa bilaterals (and the WPL) is that tickets are no longer free, as they have traditionally been. Women’s games remain affordable (the cheapest tickets were INR 150), but it is a step forward that games are still sold out, especially on weekdays.
To understand who these fans were and why they were coming for Women’s matches, the Best of Cricket team surveyed 200 people during the Chennai leg of the recently concluded India-South Africa series.
There were some encouraging signs. Despite the fact that Chennai had not hosted a Women’s game in 8 years, 31.2% of those surveyed said that this was not their first Women’s match. Similarly, two-thirds of the attendees (66.5%) said that they followed Women’s cricket in some form or the other, with 43% saying that they even watch the matches live online or on TV.
44.7% of those surveyed said they knew at least a few of the Indian players, with only 9% saying that they did not know anyone. The South African players were not as popular, but even then over half (51.5%) the fans surveyed said they knew at least one player3.
Sportstar’s Lavanya Lakshminarayanan, who covered all the Chennai matches, had a funny anecdote about how the games realistically increased even the most casual fans’ knowledge and interest around Women’s cricket.
Sitting near the press box during the first T20I was a group of 20 young men who had come to the match because they found Smriti Mandhana attractive, and hoped to catch a glimpse of her in person. But, as the first innings unfolded and South African opener Tazmin Brits smacked her way to 81 off just 56 balls, the conversation changed.
Suddenly, the group were busy Googling Brits, while quoting stats and trivia at each other. Gender no longer mattered, just performances and entertainment.
The conversations with fans also revealed another interesting advantage that Women’s cricket currently holds. The game has big stars, but it’s not overwhelmingly popular like Men’s cricket. Going for a Women’s game still holds some old-school charm.
Kunal Kothari, a fan who made it to the second ODI in Bengaluru, phrased it best when he told Best of Cricket, “There are fewer people watching, but…[they are] more into the game than the average Men’s cricket fan.” Kothari ended up sitting next to a couple of fans who had flown down from Mumbai for the match, and who dragged him into belting out chants together!
Another fan, Koushik Sekar, made it to the Test and the final T20 in Chennai. According to him, the relaxed atmosphere was more enjoyable than the forced fan participation that is a staple of the Men’s team’s matches in India.
“I liked it better without someone…playing unnecessary chants and being forced to participate [as a fan],” he said. “This also gave the crowd [a chance] to make their own slogans and sing and I could hear a few enthusiastic people doing that.”
The low ticket prices were another popular factor. 21.2% of people surveyed said that they came for the matches because they had nothing else to do that evening, which significantly overlapped with the 23.2% who said that they came for the match because the tickets were cheap.
But, I will leave the last word on this to Rondeep Lahkar, a super fan from Assam who consistently travels the country to watch as much cricket as he can. “I watched a men's game for INR 2,500 last season. I would have done the same for this game [the Chennai Test],” he said. “As the women's game grows gradually, I wish for some level of [price] parity.”
How does the media cover Women’s cricket?
Much like the cricket authorities, the cricket media needs verified audience interest to dedicate full-time resources to Women’s cricket. But, that doesn’t mean they’ve ignored it.
Some changes are easy. In April 2021, ESPNcricinfo editor Sambit Bal put out an advisory that his outlet was going to start referring to batsmen as batters (alongside other changes) in a bid to improve their editorial standards on the Women’s game.
Similarly, there are individual reporters who took the time out to keep abreast of the news in Women’s cricket; the aforementioned Purnima Malhotra, Annesha Ghosh, Gomesh S., & P.K. Ajith Kumar to name a few.
Dedicating official resources and time is another matter altogether. The 2020 World Cup final was an important event, but it was quickly followed by the outbreak of Covid which killed any momentum.
However, the 2022 Australia-India series that packed out the DY Patil stadium in Mumbai was soon followed by the 2023 T20 World Cup in South Africa, and the inaugural 2023 WPL. The momentum created by those three back-to-back events coincided with at least three game-changing moments for the media.
The first is a willingness to spend money. The New Indian Express sent Gomesh S. to South Africa in 2023 in (as far as I can tell) the first and only example of an Indian outlet paying for a reporter to travel abroad to cover a Women’s World Cup. In private conversations, multiple journalists have told me that their organisation is considering sending someone to the World Cup in Bangladesh in October 2024.
The second is increased online audience interaction. It’s hard to assess social media usage for these events, but there is a source that provides an insight into cricket-specific enthusiasm for any given match; ESPNcricinfo’s user-submitted comments during their ball-by-ball match commentaries.
The 2023 WPL final saw 65 published user comments, or a comment every 0.4 overs on average. That’s an astonishingly high number that’s comparable to many Men’s matches, and was proof that sustained high profile Women’s cricket does generate fan interest4.
The third is an interest in stories even when there are no games scheduled. In July 2023, Sportstar profiled an upcoming Indian Women’s player; she had not made a name for herself yet, the India Women’s team was half a year away from their next series, and the next WPL season was nearly eight months away. The article still did impressive numbers. Readers were definitively interested in Women’s cricket.
This willingness to publish more articles on Women’s cricket has also increased over the last six months. Australia toured India at the start of 2024. Together, Cricbuzz & ESPNcricinfo published 57 articles on the series, with a lot of the coverage focussed on the uniqueness of a Test match in India.
Comparatively, during the South Africa tour of India in mid-2024, the two outlets published 70 articles, or a 22% jump in coverage, with a more equal focus on all formats. Across the four outlets5 that consistently sent reporters to cover matches during the South Africa series, there were 144 articles published.
Encouragingly, this growth in the Women’s game is also increasing the number of articles published by women. As I analysed for the 2023 ODI World Cup, female journalists only wrote 3.6% of all articles, while even during the 2024 WPL season, they only authored 14.3% of all articles.
During the South Africa series, that number was a much healthier 48.61%.
Has the BCCI been a help or a hindrance?
The simple answer is that the BCCI has helped. They’ve taken a progressive view on Women’s cricket, they pioneered equal pay programs, and they created the WPL (which is already the second most valuable Women’s sports league in the world).
But, they’ve also been careless about how they’ve managed the team, how they market the Women’s game, and how they openly prioritise the Men’s team.
From December 2022 to October 2023, the Indian Women’s team didn’t have a head coach. If you recollect, that was the influential period that spanned the Australia tour to India, the World Cup in South Africa, & the inaugural WPL.
Similarly, after building this incredible momentum in the early months of 2023, the Indian Women only played 3 games in 8 months until a December series against England.
The situation is better now. The Indian Women’s team have played bilateral series against Australia, England & South Africa in the last six months, plus the WPL. They’ve got the Asia Cup and the T20 World Cup to look forward to in the next 4 months as well.
But, there is still unnecessary mismanagement. The ODIs and the Test against South Africa coincided with the Men’s T20 World Cup, and the T20s coincided with the Men’s tour of Zimbabwe (there were literally fixtures of both series on the same day).
More unforgivably, the BCCI decided to announce that Gautam Gambhir had become the Men’s head coach while the Women’s team were playing their final, deciding T20 match against South Africa to level the series. No prizes for guessing which piece of news hogged the limelight on social media and in newspapers’ sports pages.
Similarly, their manner of organising the ticketing for the South Africa series has been confusing. Despite evidence that Bengaluru can host a stadium full of Women’s cricket fans, only half the stadium was ever opened for ticket sales. In Chennai, you could (sometimes) buy a ticket at the stadium for the T20s, but on the same night (for the same seat) you could be asked to pay either INR 100, INR 150 or INR 160 based on the whims of the sales attendant.
The games were managed and marketed badly from a fan perspective. According to aforementioned cricket super fan Rondeep Lahkar, “There was no official word on…the [Chennai Test] being made free of cost to the public until 2-3 days before the game, whereas in the Men's game tickets are out weeks in advance.”
Similarly, Kunal Kothari - the fan who went for an ODI in Bengaluru - said, “Apart from the street vendors selling India jerseys you wouldn’t have known there’s a game going on [outside the stadium].”
This lack of marketing was confirmed by Sportstar’s Lavanya Lakshminarayanan. She travels 16 kilometers everyday from her house to her office (which is near the stadium in Chennai), and she never once saw an ad for the Women’s series. Her newsroom even offered to help run some online engagement with the players to promote the series, but never heard back from any authorities.
A lot of good has come from the BCCI’s decision to invest in Women’s cricket, but they can’t treat the game like a step-child of the Men’s game. It’s a different sport with a different fan base that requires different treatment.
Epilogue
Women’s cricket has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. The Indian national team has cemented themselves as one of the favourites for international trophies, and are the expected winners of the upcoming Asia Cup and World Cup.
Some Indian players have millions of fans now, and in Smriti Mandhana, the team has a unique superstar at the height of her powers. As the New Indian Express’ Kalyani Mangale put it, Mandhana is like Sachin Tendulkar in the 1990s. She draws huge audiences in person and over broadcasts, who lose interest when she gets out.
Having three IPL teams create franchises in the WPL has been a boon too. Media-savvy players like Mandhana, Jemimah Rodrigues & Shreyanka Patil can lean on the 17-year old fan bases at RCB, MI & DC to get a huge popularity boost instantly.
But, this all still feels tentative. Remember that survey we ran? There was one question that I haven’t mentioned yet.
We asked the respondents how big a fan they were of Women’s cricket compared to Men’s cricket. 59.3% of respondents said that they would consider themselves only or primarily a fan of Men’s cricket. Not a single person said that they were only a fan of Women’s cricket, and only 1% said that they would call themselves primarily fans of Women’s cricket.
A reminder; the survey was conducted among fans who had paid to attend a Women’s cricket match!
The popularity of the Women’s game is still dependent on convincing Men’s cricket fans to try watching it.
It was not the worst strategy in 2016, when people were still surprised that reporters showed up for a bilateral series. But the game is bigger now, the stars are bigger, and there’s hundreds of millions of dollars invested in “the opportunity”.
Unless the major stakeholders in Women’s cricket - the BCCI, the state boards, the WPL franchises, the media, the broadcasters - start to build a differentiated product for a differentiated audience, there will always be an underlying risk of isolation.
No relation to me.
Mandhana has become so popular that she has 11.7M Instagram followers. There are only 10 active male Indian cricketers with a bigger following!
If I had to guess whom, I’d say either Laura Wolvaardt or Marizanne Kapp. The WPL really has done wonders for raising the profile of female cricketers from across the globe.
For comparison, the one-off AUS-IND T20 series in January 2024 and the SA-IND T20 series in July 2024 saw an average rate of one comment every 2 overs. Still good, but significantly fewer than the 2023 WPL final because of a lack of continuous high profile Women’s games. On the other, the 2024 WPL final only saw a comment once every 4.8 overs on average. I don’t have an explanation for that one.
ESPNcricinfo, Cricbuzz, Sportstar & New Indian Express.
Very well written and kudos for doing the research!