No, Andy Roberts. Women don't make cricket 'sissy', they make it equal sport
A couple of days ago, Sri Lanka's Chamari Athapaththu scored 178 in a team total of 257, in the ongoing Women's World Cup. India's classy left-hander Smriti Mandhana, followed her heroic 90 against England, with a match-winning ton in India's second game in the same tournament.
But let's go a little back in time. 2015. The 123-year-old Central Lancashire League. It was Heywood versus Unsworth. Kate Cross, a woman, playing only her second game for the club, ripped through Unsworth, picking 8-47, in what was a resounding victory for her team.
In 1997, Belinda Clark became the first cricketer to score an ODI double hundred. This was 13 good years before a man would do the same.
Women have been playing cricket for over a hundred years now. Cricketing legend has it that Christina Willis, sister of a Kent cricketer in the 1890s, used to bowl round-arm, much, much before bowling underarm, as was the norm then, was banned.
I don't know what ails former West Indies fast bowling great Andy Roberts then, to believe having women makes this game a "sissy's game", if, for a moment we overlook the problematics of the term "sissy" itself. Back in the '70s, Roberts used to be a special cricketer, with an indispensable presence in the famed West Indian pace quartet, a deadpan face whether he bounced a batsman out or got hit for a boundary, and murderous eyes that were the sole window to a mind that was always at work planning dismissals.
Knighted in 2014, the outspoken veteran went on a bashing spree yesterday, calling out the West Indies cricket board's flawed policies, lamenting the loss of aggressive fast bowling, and probably ruing the loss of a time which many see as the golden age of fast bowling, after the notorious Bodyline decade of the 1930s.
To many purists, cricket is an esoteric cult called test cricket, and fast bowling is seen as a lost art, one whose authenticity has faded away with the demise of quality, fast pitches. True, that the modern version of the game is heavily tilted in favour of the batsmen, and bowlers are undergoing constant physical and psychological stress, overworked, and used merely as a secondary feature in a game that is an exhibition of "maximums". However, beneath all that, is a private club of connoisseurs of "pure" cricket that long for something totally different.
Longing for long-gone visions of the past is undoubtedly mankind's biggest failing. It has been a constant problem with us "cricket purists" too. Salman Rushdie said this in an entirely different context, but it applies equally well: "Authenticity is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language, and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogenous and unbroken tradition... So the reality of the mixed tradition is replaced by the fantasy of purity."
Pining for a fantasy of a purity that includes toxic masculinity is what the likes of Roberts ail from. Thus, according to them, the game (and believe me, any game) has to be kept away from gentleness, friendliness, and skill has to be used sparingly, and merely as framework for piecing together a theatrical presentation for the violence-deprived, since violence and misogyny, are embedded deep within the human heart. Roberts wears the binary of men being stronger and hence superior and women being frail and passive, on his sleeve.
Though Roberts never sledged, this is surely the time to talk about a tradition that prides itself on sledging that involves dragging women into on-field banter, fast bowlers threatening to kill batsmen on their face. He also calls modern players "chickenhearted". What is this, a war, Mr Andy Roberts?
Roberts totally disses a young and upcoming talent, Alzarri Joseph, a man, because he bowls slower than he would have liked him to. So agitated is Roberts that he fails to understand that there are no people making "rules" or “sissifying” his beloved “men's only” game.
That the game has merely undergone changes and he has woken up a tad late. Women play a lot more cricket now, and people are looking out of their holes and appreciating, if only to sound less sexist and nicer on social media.
The Women's Cricket World Cup is as exciting, and Cricket Australia has even started a women's version of their domestic T20 competition. Roberts' own nation has produced some fine women cricketers like Stafanie Taylor and Deandra Dottin.
The West Indies men's cricket team is known more for their T20 skills, their antics on the field, their friendly behaviour, a far cry from the 70s squad that Sir Roberts is still dreaming about. Far from adulterating the game, women have only made it much more gender-sensitive.
Women's cricket has been full of superstars, if that's what haters need. Betty Snowball scored 189 off 222 balls in a test in the 1930s.
Her opening partner, Myrtle Maclagan, was a self-taught off-spinner that scalped 7 wickets in the first ever women's test match. The English team of the 60s were held as the Invincibles.
I could go on and on sharing anecdotes that go on to show why cricket has never been just a man's game. Ellyse Perry and Chloe Wallwork, too, have played alongside men. But even this is not my point. Women who play with and against women, are just as much cricketers as those breaking into men's teams.
When it comes to keeping women out of it, what I humbly want to tell Roberts is that there used to be a time when everything was a man's sport. Life is far harsher than this petty game, and women have been equal participants despite centuries of oppression and stigma.
The game is about skills, and so it will always be. Having women only makes the game a lot more inclusive and helps to destroy stereotypes about sports and gender.
Also read: It's not you Virat Kohli - Mithali Raj is India's new Captain Cool