6 reasons to watch women's cricket

Are you a cricket fan? Do you wake up or stay awake at ungodly hours to watch your favourite team play? Most probably, you can rattle off the batting and bowling averages and strike rates of your favourite player without a second thought.So if I ask you to name 10 women cricketers, it shouldn’t be difficult for you, but is this really the case? Alas, no. Even if I sugarcoat things, most people wouldn’t be able to come up with more than 4-5. Why is there such a bias against the women’s game? While lakhs of people flock to watch men play all around the world, in the Women’s Cricket World Cup in 2013, the venue of a women’s match was shifted to accommodate a Ranji Trophy match. That is how dire the state is.What is there in the men’s game that women lack? The honest and the first answer to your mind would be ‘money’. Not to forget about the phenomenal pace at which men’s game is played at. Men’s cricket has a variety of international and domestic tournaments all over the year while the women do not enjoy such benefits.By the end of 2014, men’s teams would have played around 40 Test matches while only 3 women’s Tests have been played during the same period.Here are 6 reasons, which would make you want to watch women play cricket:

#1 Fair game between bat and ball

In recent times, the men’s game has become more of a contest between the bat and the bat, where the bowlers are hit all over the park. But not in women’s cricket, the bowlers are as important as the batswomen.

The pacers swing the ball, the spinners flight it and batswomen push it gloriously towards the boundary and steal runs. As Sunil Gavaskar would say, “The 1s are converted to 2s and the 2s to 3s” without dealing only in boundaries.

#2 Maintaining a good run-rate

India’s Mithali Raj

Mithali Raj, the captain of the Indian women’s team has amassed 4,791 runs in 148 ODIs at an average of 50.43. Deandra Dottin had a strike rate of 126.96 in the World Cup, hitting 28 fours and 12 sixes during the tournament.

But that is not what women’s cricket is all about. It is about sweet timers of the cricket ball. Watch the likes of Charlotte Edwards, Harmanpreet Kaur and Suzie Bates bat and you won’t be disappointed, because even in men’s cricket for all the Gayles, Maxwells and Pollards of the world, a true cricket fan survives on Amlas, Pujaras and Clarkes of the world.

#3 Creating records

Belinda Clark

Everyone knows Umar Gul was the first bowler to take a fifer in cricket’s shortest format for men, but how many people know that Priyanka Roy of India achieved this feat earlier in the 2009 ICC World T20? Do people know that Belinda Clarke made a double hundred in ODIs 13 years before Sachin Tendulkar did?

Recently, Meg Lenning, the Australian captain, made 128 runs from just 65 balls against Ireland making it the second highest score by a male or female in a T20 International match.

#4 Love of the game

BCCI, the world’s richest sporting body, does not even offer central contracts to its women players. Most of them work with Railways and have to take work leaves to take part in training camps. Even though they are paid peanuts and treated very poorly in comparison to their male counterparts, they still give their 100% only ‘for the love of the game’.

Recently, Cricket Australia and the ECB announced central contracts for its national women’s teams and other boards like New Zealand and Sri Lanka followed suit. We can safely say women’s cricket has come a long way from 1976 when English captain Rachael Heyhoe-Flint said: “Women will always play for the love of the game and there will be no professional female cricketers."

#5 No match-fixing scandal

Even though limelight is required for any sport to prosper, it does come with some consequences. While men’s cricket is digging its own grave with all the fixing scandals and betting charges, women’s cricket is living in a fairytale world of its own. So when you watch a closely-fought game between two women’s teams, your first thought is not necessarily ‘arey bhai fixed hai’ (obviously, it was fixed).

Who could have thought that no money in the game could have advantages as well? It does keep the ‘Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy’ at bay.

#6 Home advantage

The Indian cricket team at the Wormsley Test

‘Home advantage’ - This has to be the most abused term in men’s cricket. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and England prepare fast pitches on which players from the subcontinent don’t have a chance. The pitches in the subcontinent are dust bowls and spinners create problems for batsmen from overseas. With a few exceptions, the home team wins most games. For example, England beat touring Australia 3-0 in the 2013 Ashes and when they toured Australia less than 6 months later they lost 5-0.

This is more not usually the case in women’s cricket. The Indian team, playing their first Test match after 8 years, beat the English team in their own backyard in July 2014. In the recently concluded South Africa-Sri Lanka series in the island nation, the South African women won 2-1.