Cricket fans rejoice: England are the best team in the world. Having trounced India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and New Zealand to win both the 2009 World Cup and the World Twenty20, the team have just retained the Ashes, following a spirited performance by their batting middle-order.

Dream on, you might reply. But this is the striking record of the England Women's Cricket XI over the past 12 months. Gordon Brown, for one, is impressed. Inviting the team to No 10 after their win at the World Twenty20, he said: "I know that the whole country will want to join me
in recognising and celebrating a remarkable achievement."

However, the PM's gusto sounded a little hollow, and the then culture secretary, Andy Burnham, knew why. "[Women's sport] is not being taken anywhere near seriously . . . enough," he told the Guardian in January.

Women's cricket is now starting to receive a higher profile. This year, Claire Taylor, the first woman ever to score a century at Lord's, also became the first woman to be voted one of Wisden's Top Five World Cricketers. But the disparity between coverage of men's and women's sports in general remains marked. Analysis by the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation in 2006 showed that sportswomen received roughly 5 per cent of the column space devoted to their male counterparts. Once tennis, athletics and swimming are dropped from the equation, the figure falls further. Women's cricket is nowhere to be seen.

Ten years after the Marylebone Cricket Club, the world's oldest club, finally deigned to admit female members, cricket remains affected by chauvinism. Those who would reduce the sport to a "faster, higher, stronger" contest frequently argue that the women's game lacks the pace of the men's version. Dominic Lawson recently typified this view. "It's no criticism of women to point out that they are physically incapable of propelling
a cricket ball at 90mph," he puffed. "With the truly exceptional man . . . there is . . . [a] gasping astonishment . . . that such strength and power could be encompassed by a human being at all." Judging by this standard, S F Barnes, the early 20th-century cricketer widely regarded as one of the best bowlers in history, would not make the pantheon of all-time greats, delivering the ball as he did at around medium pace. Nor would Shane Warne.

C L R James, the Trinidadian political theorist and author of cricketing classic Beyond a Boundary, took a somewhat different view. He thought of the cricket field as a reflection of society. For him, cricket was "a stage on which selected individuals played representative roles . . . charged with social significance".

The sport was not simply a symbol of colonial power; in the right hands it could become a
force for the formation of a more just society. He was talking about the politics of colonialism then,
but his remarks could be applied more generally today to the search for greater equality.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website