Today saw the finals at Lords, in London, of two major international cricket competitions: the World Twenty20 Women's Championship and the World Twenty20 Men's Championship. (Any US readers who feel cricket is merely a parochial interest should attend to the exciting footnote.*)
Although Twenty20, the shortest form of the game, is not a version of cricket I much admire, the importance of these two contests within the sport cannot be denied.
In the World Twenty20 Men's competition the final was between Sri Lanka and underdog Pakistan, with the latter winning quite convincingly. It's always nice when the underdog wins, but this match represented something more. Just a few months ago Pakistani terrorists attacked the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore . . . which is one of the reasons why Pakistan were the underdogs here: since that attack their opportunities to play international cricket have been severely circumscribed while everyone waits for the Pakistani government to pull its finger out and restore some order to that nation. Thus the fact that the final should be between these two nations seems, in a way, a symbolic message to the terrorists that they should go stuff their heads where the sun don't shine.
So, yes, it was an important match. It's perfectly legitimate that stories about it should be plastered all over the BBC's website.
But what of the other World Championship final? This was between England and New Zealand, and was won in emphatic fashion by England; as more than one commentator has observed, it's as if the England team is in a different league from every other team in the world, with that symptomatic ability -- like Roger Federer used to have in the tennis world -- to step up a gear whenever the occasion demands. The English women now hold the World Twenty20 trophy, the World Cup (for 50-over matches) and the Ashes (the trophy hotly battled in both men's and women's cricket between England and Australia) -- in other words, every possible international award a women's cricket team could possess. Their captain, Charlotte Edwards, was quite rightly awarded an MBE a few weeks ago.
You can find an account of this match on the BBC website -- and for once without enormous difficulty, assuming you follow all the breathless headlines concerning the men's match. It doesn't deserve a headline of its own, of course, being beaten out in the sports-headlines stakes by someone winning a Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Reality check: There are lots of Formula 1 Grand Prix races every year and the audience is strictly limited, but a World Twenty20 contest comes along only every few years.
Perhaps the Beeb is influenced in its thinking by the Formula 1 establishment's own estimate of the popularity of its sport, which is that it attracts some 40 billion television viewers per annum. This is a figure made all the more remarkable by the fact that there are fewer than eight billion people in the world.
This demotion to the sidelines is a consistent insult offered to women's cricket by the BBC. I have given up trying to find sensible cricket coverage on the Beeb and instead, for both divisions of the game, now turn to Cricinfo.com.
Probably, the Beeb feels that the relative obscurity it accords to stories related to women's cricket is merited in that, after all, women's cricket doesn't have all that much of a following. (Pass me another G&T, will you, Maurice? That's put the bloody gels in their place, eh, what?)
Well, there's a very good reason why women's cricket doesn't have a following to rank with the male equivalent, and this is that -- don't start trying to dodge the spotlight now! -- the one organization which might reasonably be expected to screen lots of women's cricket matches and thereby upwardly affect the sport's popularity, the BBC, steadfastly refuses to do so . . . because, after all, the sport doesn't have that huge a following, and . . .
The record's cracked from side to side.
The idea that women's cricket is inferior to men's is one that dates back to a generation that's now largely dead, at least outside the confines of Broadcasting House, where mummified hands still doubtless sign off on archaic decisions while their owners yearn wistfully for the days of Empire. It's a fact that female fast bowlers aren't (on average) as fast as male fast bowlers, and likewise that female batters don't (on average) hit the ball as hard or as far as their male counterparts. But some of the legends of male cricket haven't been hard hitters (Geoff Boycott, among batsmen) or fast bowlers (Shane Warne, Abdul Qadir, and a billion other wizardly spinners). What cricket is all about isn't brute force: it's about skill. It's about what in my own personal terminology of sport I call The Dance. And in skill the best of the female cricketers match, or arguably outmatch, the men.
Over the past couple of years I've become a huge fan of women's cricket. In part this is chauvinism: "my" team, the England men's team, is in desperate need to shake off the culture of arrogant stupidity that consistently makes it underestimate inferior opposition and thereby quite frequently lose to it. (They at last have a skipper for the Test side, Andrew Strauss, who seems adversarial to this idiocy, but he has yet to gain sufficient stature to throw out or re-educate some of the buttheads in his team.) You'll understand, then, the allure of finding another English cricket team that doesn't make me spend much of my time fantasizing about ramming their collective heads down the nearest toilet.
A second chauvinism: I gotta confess that, all other things being equal, given a choice I would, to paraphrase with quite extraordinary looseness the great 19th-century cricketer W.G. Grace, far rather spend a few hours watching Isa Guha bowl than Geoff Boycott bat.
Ignoring that last paragraph, which
![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pds_lit undoubtedly won't, the point remains: women's cricket is hugely growing in popularity despite the fact that atavistic broadcasting organizations like the BBC are doing their doughtiest to make sure it doesn't. What the Beeb don't seem to realize is that, by ignoring one particular sport, they're effectively making the whole of their sports coverage crappy. It's as if the organization were trying to sell an encyclopedia with one of the volumes missing: "Hey, no one's much interested in topics that begin with 'R', and we aim to keep it that way. Your encyclopedia's every bit as good without them."And, of course, the BBC, an organization that very much vaunts itself as one that rejects sexual discrimination (and every other form of personal discrimination), is here guilty of the most egregious sexism.
Shame on them!
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That footnote:
* The most popular sports in the world, ordered by numbers of fans (according to WikiAnswers.com):
1) Soccer. 3.3-3.5 Billion Fans. (Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas,etc)
3) Field Hockey. 2-2.2 Bilion Fans. (Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia)
4) Tennis. Around 1 Billion Fans. (Europe, Americas, Asia)
5) Volleyball Around 900 Million Fans. (Asia, Erope, Americas, Australia)
6) Table Tennis Around 900 Million Fans. (Asia, Europe, Africa, Americas)
7) Baseball Around 500 Million Fans. (U.S, Japan, Cuba, Dom rep)
8) Golf Around 400 Million Fans. (U.S, Canada, Europe)
9) Gridiron (american football) 390-410 Million Fans. (U.S mainly)
10) Basketball Not more than 400M Fans. (U.S, Canada mainly)
