Bowled over: To the band of believers that got us here

WOMEN’S CRICKET TURNS A CORNER

- Kunal Pradhan

The march for equal rights and recognition for women has been longer than it ever should have been.

Today there is universal suffrage, fan following in sport, megastar status in music and film, there are corporate leaders and world leaders, but the battle for parity continues.

One illustration of this most basic of injustices is how we in India treated women's cricket from the mid-'70s, when they played their first Test match, to the mid-2020s, when they suddenly became the toast of the nation on winning their first World Cup.

For these 50 years, India's national obsession was fuelled only by the men's team, even as the other national team was ignored.

For four of the last five decades, there was neither funding nor backing for women in India, and frankly in most nations, to pursue cricket as a viable professional sport. Sure, there were sometimes pats on the shoulder and platitudes, and someone could perhaps pull out a list of Arjuna Award citations to counter the point, but women's cricket lived in the dangerous limbo that exists between patronisation and rejection.

Not any longer.

Over the course of two nights in OctoberNovember 2025, the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai became the stage on which women's cricket would find its rightful place.