Women’s cricket and role models

Two weeks ago, the Premadasa Stadium in Colombo was packed to over its full capacity of 35,000 as Sri Lankans streamed in to watch the national team win the Cricket Twenty-Twenty (T20) World Cup. Instead they were witness to the demolition of their dreams at the hands of the West Indies team.

Since then the sports and opinion pages of the country’s newspapers have been filled with news and analyses of the causes of this tragic defeat.

They overflow with suggestions for means of revitalising the team, from the employment of group psychology to forming a separate T20 team. One would scarcely be aware that, just prior to the Sri Lanka-West Indies T20 men’s final, there had been a possibly even more thrilling final at the Premadasa Stadium - a sort of T20 ashes match, as Australia beat England on the very last ball to retain the women’s world championship.

Sri Lankans may not have been aware, either, that the Sri Lanka women’s team had performed fairly badly, being beaten by New Zealand for a place in the semi-finals (although they had previously defeated the West Indies).

People may not even know that the Sri Lanka women’s team is to compete at the Women’s T20 Asia Cup, starting at Guanggong International Cricket Stadium, Guangzhou later this month.

More exposure needed for women cricketers

Indeed, the closest the Sri Lanka women’s team has come to making international headlines was when three of its players (including the captain) disappeared at Heathrow on the way back from a successful tour of the West Indies in 2003.

Lack of coverage

This lack of coverage for women’s cricket is indeed unfortunate. Given the popularity of cricket in Sri Lanka, women cricketers should be able to aspire to the same high profile as enjoyed by their male counterparts, including their portrayal as role models for young people.

The modern era requires a very complex input to society from women. Motherhood, while deemed desirable by most women, is not by itself an adequate and sufficient goal for womanhood. In Sri Lanka, in addition to their traditional role as mothers, women - over half the island’s population - also make an enormous contribution in terms of production and provision of services.

Women’s labour is responsible for most of the country’s foreign exchange earnings, in the traditional tea and rubber sector, in the garments sector and from overseas employment. The government depends heavily on female employees, especially on teachers and nurses, while higher echelons of administration are filled with more and more women.

It should be added that women fulfilled important military roles, on both sides, in the recently concluded conflict.

However, in the sports arena women are often sidelined. Occasionally, the spotlight is centred on a brilliant female athlete, but there is no sustained effort to develop positive feminine role models in team sports.

By way of contrast, the approach in the developed countries is to build up strong female exemplars in team games. For instance, England cricket all-rounder Arran Brindle is a classic role-model for women. She returned to the national team after being out of the game for several years for pregnancy and child-rearing - her four-year-old son Harry accompanied her and the team to Sri Lanka this year.

Last year, Bridle scored 128 for her team, Louth Cricket Club, becoming the first woman ever to score a century in the men’s Premier League. She was selected to be a torch-bearer for the London Olympics this year because of her outstanding performance.

Similarly, Sri Lanka needs to focus on women’s sports the same way as has been done with men’s cricket. It should be borne in mind that cricket was not always as popular in this country as it has now become.

Before Sri Lanka achieved Test status cricket only had a following among the elite, in the ‘big schools’ with their ‘big matches’. Even some ‘big school’ ‘big matches’ are not of great antiquity - the Thurstan-Isipatana encounter, for example, is less than 50 years old. Until the ‘90s, the national team was peopled mainly by players from the elite schools.

Promoting female sports

Among the common people, in ordinary schools, cricket was simply not played. The national sport, it should be noted is not cricket but volleyball - selected because there was sufficient public open space in every town and village for it to be played. Many poor village boys and girls only managed to observe the rest of their own homeland while travelling with their school volleyball team.

In the urban areas, the favourite sport was overwhelmingly football. There were over 300 football clubs in Colombo alone, ranging from top teams such as Saunders and Sunrise to innumerable smaller, neighbourhood ‘Dynamos’, ‘Red Stars’ and ‘Uniteds’.

Cricket took off after 1977 for three reasons. Firstly, it was the elite sport par excellence, which mattered in the new era of emulation of one’s economic betters. Secondly, Sri Lanka’s performance at the World Cup encounters beginning in 1975, combined with achievement of Test status, gave the national team a place in the world.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Cricket was covered by all media, far more extensively than other sports. Of especial import was the intensive coverage almost from the beginning by the fledgling television services - the sport grew with the medium, bringing the game vividly into the poorest home.

Success has fed on success. The popularity of cricket and cricketers has meant greater advertising revenue, which is fed back into the game, generating even more revenue.

The very success of cricket in the country in the past three decades, as well as its position as the second most popular spectator sport in the world, makes Women’s cricket an obvious vehicle for promoting female sports role models.

And who is to gainsay that the application of only a fraction of the effort now expended on the men’s game will not create the same level of interest in the women’s version of the sport?