Hit for six India's World Cup win is a victory for equality

Growing up in rural India, Shafali Verma always knew she had a hunger to play cricket.

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen DELHI

But in her small town of Rohtak, in the north Indian state of Haryana, cricket was not a game for girls. Aged nine, desperate to play, she cut her hair short, entered a tournament disguised as her brother, and went on to win man of the match.

Verma's determined father, Sanjeev, in the face of refusal from every cricket academy or training centre that would not accept his daughter, enrolled her as a boy. "Luckily, nobody noticed," he recalled, as Verma made her debut for the national women's team at 15 years old.

Earlier this month, Verma stood triumphantly with her teammates as they held aloft the Women's Cricket World Cup, making history as the first Indian women's national team to win the cup - and for equality. The struggles and sacrifices made for years by the women to get here - defying social stigma, a lack of resources and juggling manual jobs between training - made their win even more extraordinary.

It came at a critical turning point for women's cricket in India, where the sport verges on a national religion, is a multibillion dollar industry but also widely regarded as a "gentleman's game". It was only in 2017 that female cricketers were given full-time professional contracts and a women's premier league (WPL) established in 2023.