T20 World Cup: India’s emergence to provide seismic shift

India have come late to women’s cricket but the sport’s sleeping giant has finally woken.

Poonam Yadav of India celebrates with wicketkeeper Taniya Bhatia after bowling Ellyse Perry of Australia for a duck. Picture: AAP

It was a moment to savour. It may even have been the outstanding individual moment of summer. First game of the women’s T20 World Cup; first ball faced by the homecoming queen Ellyse Perry, bearing her laurels from Allan Border Medal night.

First appearance on tour of India’s Poonam Yadav, with her hard-spun, high-tossed leg-breaks. It’s a googly — the ball that did for Bradman second ball in his last Test innings. Perry does not last as long. She embarks boldly, gropes sightlessly, is bowled between bat and pad, left sprawled on the pitch.

Poonam finishes with 4-19, India win handily by 17 runs, and the cup, whose promotion has sometimes made it look like an excuse for a Katy Perry concert, suddenly takes on the shade of a serious sporting contest.

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This is not perhaps so remarkable a state of affairs. India, thanks to Harmanpreet Kaur’s unforgettable 171 not out from 115 balls, shoved Australia aside in the last 50-over World Cup semi-final; Australia just edged them in the tri-series leading into this tournament.

But their advance is quite stunning. Eight days in and India lead the tournament, Poonam’s dozen overs having yielded eight for 69, defending their unbeaten record against Sri Lanka in Melbourne on Saturday.

India and Australia, meanwhile, are developing a rivalry in women’s cricket similar to the men’s, which is great, as they already share a lot — more even than stakes in Pune-born, Sydney-bred Lisa Sthalekar.

Several sources credit an Australian-born teacher, Miss Anne Kelleve, as the pioneer of women’s cricket in India, for making the game compulsory in 1913 at a progressive girls’ school in Kerala, Bakers Memorial.

Netta Rheinberg’s authoritative book Fair Play depicts Kelleve as “a portly lady running with effortless ease to chase the ball or snatch a single run”, but she was also a promoter of women’s football, lived to a ripe old age and if any reader can enlighten me as to what an Australian teacher was doing in India more than a century ago I would be intrigued to know.

As early as February 1975, less than two years after India’s first provincial championships, Australia visited with an under-25 team, who undertook a remarkable 13,000km journey, drawing three unofficial Tests.

Australian female cricketers have historically found India a happy hunting ground, winning all three of the women’s ODI World Cups staged in India, while they have probably been more feted by Indians than they have by their own countrymen.

When Belinda Clark’s team won the 1997 World Cup at Eden Gardens, one of the 80,000 spectators was thrilled by the sight of Cathryn Fitzpatrick, and decided she would like to bowl fast too. Twenty years later, the magnificent Jhulan Goswami bowled Meg Lanning for nothing in that famous victory at Derby.

Harmanpreet played under Alex Blackwell at the Sydney Thunder. In the inaugural Women’s T20 Challenge in Mumbai two years ago, held ahead of the first Indian Premier League qualifier, Lanning, Perry and Harman represented the sky blue Supernovas against Goswami, Poonam, Alyssa Healy and Megan Schutt in the hot pink Trailblazers.

What’s not often realised about women’s cricket in India, however, is its relative youth. India loves cricket. It has not always loved women’s cricket because it is generally a harsh country on women, still rating poorly on most global indices of women’s health, diet, and social, educational and political opportunity.

The scourges of sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, domestic and sexual violence including marital rape and trafficking remain little checked. For an excellent new guide, I recommend A Woman’s Worth, written by an indefatigable young Australian journalist, Sophie Cousins. In the last two years, two well-written histories of women’s cricket in India have also been published: Free Hit by Suprita Das, and The Fire Burns Blue by Karunya Keshav and Sidhanta Patnaik.

Notable is that, the valiant Miss Kelleve notwithstanding, they find little to speak of before the last half-century. Women’s sport in India has a colourful but bitty history. Against considerable cultural resistance, an Indian woman went to the Olympics as early as 1924, participated at Wimbledon in 1929.

In the 1950s, Mary D’Souza Sequeira, India’s first double international, sprinted, hurdled and hit hockey goals for her country, and Hamida Banu, a female wrestler known as the Amazon of Aligarh, challenged male counterparts, promising to marry whomever beat her. Nobody did, apparently.

But the first women’s cricket clubs were not established in India until the early 1970s, a hundred years after the earliest recorded women’s games in Australia. Perhaps the identification of cricket with men actually reduced the scope for women’s participation; certainly there was little official encouragement. The Board of Control for Cricket in India did not subsume the Women’s Cricket Association of India until 2006, long after such amalgamations in Australia and England.

For a long time, too, women’s cricket in India was concentrated on a few centres and a few teams, the most notable being Railways, thanks to Diana Edjuli, a former national captain and still a sort of Mother Courage figure in the game. That’s changing. There is money around. And like its male counterparts, the composition of the women’s team is diversifying.

Poonam and her teammate Deepti Sharma are probably the most famous cricket products of Agra in Uttar Pradesh.

Harmanpreet hails from the Sikh-majority city of Moga in the Punjab (and reportedly wore the number 84 in commemoration of the 1984 riots that claimed nearly 20,000 Sikh lives after the assassination of Indira Gandhi).

Gifted left-hander Smriti Mandhana is from out-of-the-way Sangli in Maharastra, teenage wunderkind Shafali Verma from unassuming Rohtak in Haryana. The latter city’s previous claim to cricket fame was hosting the Ranji Trophy farewell of Sachin Tendulkar — aka Donald Trump’s favourite Korean champion Soo-chin Tendool-Kerr.

So while there is a natural hometown bias towards what cup success might mean for Australia, who knows what it might precipitate in the world’s biggest cricket nation? By grabbing the World T20 in 2007, MS Dhoni’s team revolutionised cricket in their land; thirteen years on, their female counterparts have a chance to do the same.