Team India has simply gained the U-19 Women’s World Cup. The Women’s IPL – formally the Women’s Premier League – is about to get underway. And the BCCI has not too long ago launched equal pay for girls gamers – a well-intentioned reform that’s groundbreaking on the planet of sport.
It lastly looks like Indian girls’s cricket is getting its due and its rightful place on the planet. Much of the present progress could be attributed to 2 main elements – the progressive mindset of the present management and the enormous shoulders of the gamers and directors from earlier than. Those that sowed the seeds beginning fifty years in the past within the early Seventies, up till the 2010s.
Shafali Verma led India to victory within the inaugural U19 Women’s T20 World Cup in South Africa just a few weeks in the past.
| Photo Credit: AP
This is a first-hand account of a few of the highlights and experiences of my very own cricket journey via the years, and of one other World Cup story (2005) from South Africa.
At the outset, I have to say that it has been my life’s best honour to have performed cricket for India. And it has been a fair better privilege to have been within the girls’s sport from the start within the nation, to have captained the Indian staff, and to have administered the sport in later years.
I made my worldwide debut for India in 1976 and continued to play for the Indian staff in Test cricket, ODIs, and two World Cups. I captained India in 1986 till my retirement in 1991. For the final 30+ years, I’ve been repeatedly taking on the reason for girls’s cricket on the highest ranges via varied positions on the Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI), Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), Asian Cricket Council (ACC) and the International Cricket Council (ICC).
Indian girls cricketer Shubhangi Kulkarni, who took 6 wickets in England’s first innings at Chepauk, Madras on February 09, 1981.
| Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES
As girls, once we first started enjoying cricket in India in 1973 (Mr M Ok Sharma registered WCAI in that yr), the enjoyment of the sport and the privilege of enjoying for the staff trumped each hardship and problem that was thrown at us. The journey, howsoever lengthy and arduous, was the vacation spot, fairly actually. Unreserved journey in crowded trains throughout the size and breadth of the nation, staying in no-star dormitories and enjoying on tough patches and grime tracks that doubled up as grounds had been the hallmarks of ladies’s cricket within the founding years. Our journey and keep logistics throughout worldwide excursions had been additionally a problem. But it was our ardour for the sport that surmounted all odds. The cricket was nice, wins had been issues to write down residence about, and losses had been what made us stronger, each as people and as a unit. You might liken the bonds we shaped to these of a metaphorical band of brothers – a gaggle of individuals sure by a standard objective, devoted and constant as a result of troublesome circumstances they confronted collectively.
While my enjoying profession might have led to 1991, the fervour to maintain constructing girls’s cricket was very a lot alive and thriving. I channeled this diehard ardour to assist construct the ladies’s sport in India. In so doing, I used to be in a position to work with different equally passionate pioneers and stalwarts of the sport. Mentoring youthful gamers, elevating funds and sponsorships, organising home matches and abroad excursions, creating jobs, offering kits and merchandise, teaching, and coaching, and elevating the profile of the ladies’s sport saved us all very busy.
In 2002, I used to be introduced with the chance to formalize my contributions. The Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI) held elections for the formation of a brand new managing committee and I noticed this as a possibility to carry each my cricket and business expertise to take the sport to the following stage. I made a decision to run for the place of Hon Secretary of WCAI, and was elected to the submit from 2003-2006.
I used to be excited on the prospect of with the ability to make a constructive influence in my new position. I realised straight away that my work was minimize out for me once I noticed the monetary state of WCAI in 2003 and discovered that the affiliation was in debt. I additionally realized early that securing funding for the affiliation was going to be a difficult job.
It was 2003, and the 2005 International Women’s Cricket World Cup was two years away. Up till then, the World Cup had been gained by both England, Australia or New Zealand and India had by no means made it previous the semi-finals. We set out on our mission. We had been going for the win.
Our preparation was going to want a radical strategy. It was additionally going to want cash, amenities, and assets. I got down to strategize with a few of the greatest minds in girls’s cricket, and in addition name in favours from people, organizations, and corporates, every time guaranteeing we had been placing the fitting peg in the fitting gap.
India’s Achilles heel was health – bodily, psychological and psychological. In the top, it was at all times health that separated us from nice outcomes.
| Photo Credit: AP
My expertise as a participant got here in helpful. I knew our girls had been a few of the world’s most expert spinners, first rate medium pacers, and technically sound batters. But our Achilles heel was health – bodily, psychological, and psychological. In the ultimate evaluation, it was at all times health that separated us from nice outcomes. This data led us to put the foundations of a successful staff. Fitness was prioritized at every coaching camp. We appointed coaches who had performed and carried out persistently on the highest ranges and trainers who had been the very best of their discipline. Sudha Shah and Dr. Hamsraj delivered on their promise. For the primary time, the ladies had been requested to depart their kits behind and endure health assessments such because the Beep Test. Based on the take a look at outcomes, gamers underwent a personalized coaching program to attain the degrees set out for them. The significance of health earlier than ability of their choice was conveyed to the gamers. This shock and awe strategy had its desired impact as gamers acquired fitter however extra importantly prioritised health for the primary time.
Next, we would have liked a world-class facility that allowed the staff to remain collectively, prepare collectively, and most of all bond collectively. The have to impart comfortable expertise corresponding to persona improvement, confidence constructing, and communication was additionally not misplaced on us.
The then Chairperson of Selectors, Shantha Rangaswamy, and I reached out to a different staff of stellar founders. Mr. Narayan Murthy, and Mr. Mohandas Pai not solely opened up the Infosys coaching amenities at Mysore, but in addition their private time and wallets. The Infosys Mysore coaching campus had a wonderful cricket floor, a world-class gymnasium and swimming pool, lecture rooms, and 5-star residential lodging. It was the proper coaching floor for a staff making ready for the World Cup.
One can’t talk about the time between 2003 and 2005 in Indian girls’s cricket with out mentioning the contributions of one other lady, Mandira Bedi, who was the craze as a girl presenter for cricket matches on the time. She helped signal a few corporations as sponsors and in a single case she even marketed for an organization and requested them to present the proceeds to the ladies’s staff.
Mandira Bedi, model Ambassador of the Indian Women’‘s Cricket staff, with the South Africa bound-squad.
| Photo Credit: Paul Noronha
The Indian staff that confirmed up throughout that point ensured that every one of this effort, sacrifice, and contributions, weren’t in useless. The staff gained a lot of the matches main as much as the World Cup. Their physique language was assured, and all the competing nations observed the constructive change on this new-look Indian staff.
And when the actual take a look at of the 2005 World Cup got here, the staff performed good cricket and blazed a path to the finals – a feat that had by no means been achieved earlier than this. And whereas we didn’t win the ultimate, the Indian girls gained the hearts of everybody in South Africa and in India. At a time when there was no social media or restricted TV protection, the Indian girls acquired a heat welcome once they returned residence, triumphant of their self perception. It was poetic justice for India when Nooshin Khadeer who was a member of the runner’s up Indian staff on the 2005 World Cup in South Africa got here again to elevate the trophy on the U-19 World Cup virtually twenty years later because the coach of the Indian staff.
Poetic justice: Nooshin Al Khadeer was a member of the 2005 Indian staff which misplaced the ultimate in 2005. 18 years later, she coached India to the title within the U19 World Cup in the identical nation.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
Back residence, there was yet another merchandise on my plate. After the 2005 World Cup, the International Women’s Cricket Council (IWCC) and the ICC had merged forming a singular world construction to manage cricket – girls’s and males’s. As a consequence, the WCAI was required to merge with the BCCI failing which we might not be capable to compete on the worldwide stage. My makes an attempt previous to 2005 to achieve out to the BCCI had not borne fruit. But it was 2005 and we had reached the finals of the World Cup and we might not be ignored anymore. I requested the ICC for a one-year extension in an effort to set the India home so as, and this was granted to us as an exception.
It would take a frontrunner with a imaginative and prescient and a objective for girls’s empowerment to allow us to play beneath the identical umbrella. In 2005, I approached then BCCI President, Mr. Sharad Pawar, who not solely took eager curiosity in girls’s cricket but in addition understood the nuances of our sport.
Former BCCI president Sharad Pawar
| Photo Credit: AP
He spoke to members of the BCCI, and after some deliberations, the BCCI began to additionally administer girls’s cricket in 2006. We not needed to fear about, and I not needed to lose sleep over, how we might fund the Indian girls’s participation within the subsequent worldwide match. From then on, it has been a gentle but outstanding climb for the ladies’s sport. Parity in amenities and coaching, entry to the National Cricket Academy, world-class journey and lodging, pensions for former gamers, have all contributed to the sturdy ecosystem that has come up for girls and ladies, across the nation.
BCCI President Roger Binny with Vice-President Rajeev Shukla, Joint Secretary Devajit Saikia, Treasurer Ashish Shelar and Secretary Jay Shah alongside and IPL Governing Council Chairman Arun Dhumal throughout a gathering asserting the profitable bidders for the inaugural version of the Women’s Indian Premier League.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Every successive management staff on the BCCI since has added their vital contributions. And now beneath Roger Binny’s and Jay Shah’s management, pay parity and the ladies’s IPL are the newest to carry the hole ever so nearer between the 2.
So the following time we see Team India play in a World Cup, it isn’t simply the eleven girls on the sphere however the scores of ladies and men who’ve come earlier than them and the imaginative and prescient, efforts, tears, sweat, and toil of so many off the sphere that we now have to be grateful for.
Shubhangi Kulkarni is a former India captain and Arjuna Awardee. She can also be the previous secretary of the Women’s Cricket Association of India.
Source: sportstar.thehindu.com