A Man's Game

The Nawab of Pataudi thinks cricket is a man's game.

The occasion for this insight was the launch of a book that chronicled India's career in one-day cricket, timed to coincide with the build-up to the 2007 World Cup. The panel assembled to discuss the book had the Nawab as the moderator. Ten minutes into the discussion (which he had thus far switched about in his deft, relaxed, posh way) came the evening's Male Moment; Pataudi turned towards the cricket editor of the Hindustan Times, Kadambari Murali, and asked:

"So, as a woman, how do you see cricket? D'you see it as a manly game…?"

Kadambari Murali, who was different from the other five panelists in being neither male nor middle-aged, made the only possible response.

"I don't approach cricket as a woman. I report on it as a professional journalist," she said. Or words to that effect.

Sitting in the audience I thought that Kadambari, who is a first rate cricket journalist, handled Pataudi's incredulity at the thought of a woman covering cricket with poise and grace. I mean, "manly game"? I haven't come across that phrase since the time I stopped reading GA Henty's Victorian stories about plucky young men in high school. I thought it was a daft thing to say. Daft, anachronistic, patronising…

And true.

Is cricket co-ed?

A month or so ago, I read on Cricinfo that India had beaten Australia in a quadrangular one-day tournament in Chennai. India won with an over to spare. J Sharma opened India's innings and scored an unbeaten century that saw India home. The reason you haven't heard of a J Sharma at the top of India's batting order is because this was a women's tournament. The last time we won a series against Australia in India, the country went mad -- Harbhajan Singh mutated into a national hero and VVS Laxman temporarily became god. Somehow I don't think Jaya Sharma is going to become a household name. She wouldn't have become one even if India had gone on to win the tournament. Because cricket, as the Nawab suggested, is a man's game.

This isn't literally true. Women play cricket; women like Sharda Ugra and Kadambari Murali and Nishi Narayanan report on it with insight and distinction for well-known magazines, newspapers and websites; I've heard two women, one West Indian and the other Indian do running commentary on international matches; and women routinely turn out to watch one-day cricket in stadiums. But none of this disproves the NOP (Nawab of Pataudi) Assumption: Women collectively, women as a sex don't play cricket or understand it or like it. And when they do, people (women included) don't take them seriously.

Why is cricket gendered?

This is the wrong question. It should be, why is nearly all sport gendered? The only game I can think of where the spectator, regardless of sex, is as likely to watch women play as men, is tennis. Alone amongst international sports, team or individual, the women's version of the game is as lucrative and popular as the men's. Maria Sharapova makes more money than nearly all the men in the game. The great symbolic acknowledgement of this parity arrived this year when Wimbledon announced that it was going to pay women the same prize money as men.

Boys and men routinely play team sports more often than girls and women do, and even where women play organised, competitive team sport it's always the male version that is the greater public spectacle. Cricket's no different. Volleyball, hockey and basketball are team sports that lots of women play but with the partial exception of basketball in US television markets, no one wants to pay to watch, and commercial sponsorship is hard to find.

Why does this happen? A large part of the explanation has to be historical. The world's team sports (with the exception of America's) were all given their modern form in 19th century England. That nursery of empire, the English public school, appropriated rugby, football and cricket and made them exercises in 'character' building, little theatres in which the future soldiers, civil servants and clergymen of the Raj were taught deference, leadership, hierarchy, and teamwork: In short, the skills and virtues that helped male Britons run the world.

So it isn't surprising that a game shaped by Victorian definitions of maleness (the 'manliness' that Pataudi spoke of) is a poor fit for contemporary Indian women. As far as the costume of cricket is concerned this is literally true. The batsman's rig, for example, is like a modern take on knightly masculinity. In place of armour you have pads, gloves, arm guards, the 'box' and the helmet, that modern accessory that ironically makes the contemporary batsman look more than ever like a medieval jouster.

Sex and the Sporting Girl

Appearances matter. Women's teams from Australia, England and New Zealand used to play in skirts (the Indian women have always, for reasons of modesty, worn trousers), but given pads and shin guards this was clearly inconvenient, so they switched to trousers. Putting a woman into standard cricket kit is a bit like cross-dressing: She becomes a cricketing man. And if cricketing gear is going to make women look like men, why would you watch less powerful nearly-men play, when you could watch the genuine article, the real thing?

I don't think it's a coincidence that women's tennis has always flirted with knickers and nipples and necklines, that Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova wear tiny frocks that make it quite clear to their audiences that they're women, not feebler versions of Rafael Nadal, that Sania Mirza and Venus Williams wear elaborate earrings on court: Women's tennis, unlike women's cricket, has no interest in unisex clothing. The sex appeal of women's tennis is an important way in which it has differentiated itself from the male game and is a crucial element in its success. From 'Gorgeous Gussie' Moran to Evonne Goolagong Cawley to Maria Sharapova, women's tennis has drawn attention to its womanliness and its audiences have responded with enthusiasm.

There's a flip side to this which isn't pretty: Women players who don't fit the templates of sexiness that marketing executives work with make much less money than women who do. So Venus Williams who is black (and not Madison Avenue's definition of a sex goddess) will never see a tenth of the money that Anna Kournikova, who never won a tournament of any consequence but who was blonde and leggy, did. And Martina Navratilova, arguably the greatest player in the history of the women's game, never made any real money out of endorsements because she came out as a lesbian and looked butch.

There are team sports which have gone down the same route. In 1998 the secretary of the Federation of International Volleyball concluded that a snugger costume would help the game find a larger audience. This meant that women volleyballers began wearing tight little shorts that showed a lot more bottom. A few years later in 2004, Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA, used the volleyball precedent to suggest a way forward for women's football. In a newspaper interview he said that women's football needed to attract sponsors from the cosmetics and fashion industry and the way to do this was to imitate women's volleyball by changing to more 'feminine' uniforms. Blatter's definition of 'feminine' wasn't complicated: "Tighter shorts, for example. In volleyball the women also wear other uniforms than the men. Pretty women are playing football today. Excuse me for saying that."

In the early Seventies when women's cricket in took off in India, international matches drew large crowds. A game between India and the West Indies in Patna attracted 25,000 spectators. In a short essay on the history of the women's game, Shubhangi Kulkarni suggests that the large crowds that greeted white touring teams had something to do with the interest Indian spectators had in the novelty of cricket played in skirts.

The pioneers of the women's game, players like Shanta Rangaswamy, Diana Edulji and Sandhya Agarwal did become famous but this wasn't enough to keep their sport in the public eye. India in the Seventies and Eighties wasn't the sort of place where promoters and marketing mavens packaged sport the way ESPN/STAR is trying to package the Premier Hockey League, with large doses of regional machismo. And the nature of cricket makes it hard to make women on the field look sexy. But whether we approve or not, that's the road women's cricket will have to take to find an audience for itself.

Anjum Chopra, a former India captain and an active international, did wonders for the profile of women's cricket in India by appearing on a cricket talk show. She was articulate, knowledgeable and, most importantly, attractive. Some face recognition through television shows and costumes that make it clear that Anjum Chopra isn't Rahul Dravid by another name might help women's cricket top that zenith of 1997 when eighty thousand people in Eden Gardens watched Australia play New Zealand in the final of the World Cup. Or maybe not. Perhaps the nature of cricket makes it hard to 'feminise'. But the moral of the story is depressingly clear: Women's games that can't be sexualised, can't be sold to the networks and the paying public.

In the meanwhile women correspondents and commentators will continue to be patronised by politically incorrect men. When Kadambari Murali spoke about cricket in that panel discussion, there were moments when I could almost see thought balloons growing out of the male panelists' heads, and the thoughts they contained were all variants of this one: I'd like to see her face Brett Lee with a bat in her hand.

Interestingly, I didn't see that thought balloon rise when the non-playing male panelist who represented a television channel gave us his expert views on the game, though confronted with Lee running up to bowl, he would have very likely become incontinent.

But there it is: life isn't fair, guys are like that and cricket remains, in Pataudi's quaint phrase, a 'manly game'.

A shorter version of this post was first published in 'M' magazine, Mar-Apr 2007. More details here.