Before packed stadiums, franchise auctions, and record-breaking sponsorships, there was a girl in Wolverhampton holding a cricket bat. When police broke up her game and scolded the boys, she asked why she wasn’t punished too. The answer was sharp: “Girls don’t play cricket.”
For Rachael Heyhoe Flint, that remark wasn’t an ending ; it was the beginning of a rebellion. She went on to organize the world’s first Cricket World Cup in 1973, funded by businessman Jack Hayward, and astonishingly, it came two years before the men even had one. Flint not only changed the direction of the sport but lit a torch that would be carried for generations of women who had to fight for the right to play.
Yet ask casual fans today and most assume the men wrote the first chapter. That is the curse of women’s cricket, always ahead in courage but behind in recognition.
India entered this world in 1978, hosting their first Women’s World Cup long before the men hosted theirs in 1987. Yet the difference was stark. Four teams, little funding, players paying their own way, and a cricket culture that viewed them as curiosities rather than athletes. Diana Edulji captained that team while working as a clerk at Western Railway. Most of her teammates juggled board exams with international fixtures. They trained without allowances, carried their own gear, and often returned to silence once the matches were over.
The train journeys of struggle
If you want to picture early Indian women’s cricket, do not imagine stadiums. Imagine unreserved compartments on long-distance trains. Each player with three pieces of luggage. No reservations. No meals arranged. No officials to handle logistics. Shantha Rangaswamy, India’s first Test captain, would pile luggage inside in the brief two-minute stops, negotiate with ticket collectors, and sometimes deal with unruly passengers. Players took turns sleeping in cramped corners near toilets, grateful if they managed a berth. When the train finally stopped, they walked with their kits to budget hotels, only to repeat the cycle the next week.
They were never paid match fees. Shantha herself never earned a rupee from playing for India. What they wanted was not money but opportunity. Even that was scarce. Between 1977 and 1984, and again between 1986 and 1991, India barely played any international series outside of one World Cup. Imagine giving a decade of your life to cricket and never getting the chance to play a second World Cup. It happened. In 1988, the Indian team even prepared in camp for the World Cup in Australia, only for the sports ministry to withdraw the entry without informing them. Shantha pleaded directly with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, but by then Australia had finalized the arrangements and declined India’s late request. She never played an ODI after 1986.
The unlikely architect
None of this would have been possible without Mahendra Kumar Sharma, a softball and handball organizer from Lucknow who became the accidental father of Indian women’s cricket. On a railway platform he once saw girls using a softball bat to play cricket. That spark made him create the Women’s Cricket Association of India in 1973. Sharma poured his own resources into the cause, persuading sponsors to step in and even roping in Bollywood stars like Vinod Khanna for exhibition matches to draw public attention. Many times, when support was scarce, he funded the movement himself. His commitment went beyond the boundary lines; after India’s victory over the West Indies in Patna, he arranged for the team to meet Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on her birthday, marking their first-ever flight together as a squad.
Sharma’s vision was simple. If women were to be noticed, they needed international exposure. Under him, the WCAI organized tournaments, built a domestic structure, and ensured India’s first World Cup participation. For all its flaws, that association gave women the only stage they had until the BCCI eventually absorbed it in 2006. And even then, the merger happened not by choice but because the ICC forced every board to integrate women’s cricket or risk exclusion. India dragged its feet until the last extension and was among the final nations to offer professional contracts, only in 2013, two years after Pakistan.
From Shadows to Spotlight
Through all this, women played and faded. Mithali Raj and Jhulan Goswami became household names, but for most of their careers they carried the game on their shoulders while crowds and sponsors looked the other way. In 2013, when India hosted the World Cup, schoolchildren in uniforms were bussed in to create the illusion of atmosphere. Venues were shifted at the last minute so that men’s domestic matches could take priority. Players stayed in budget hotels while overseas squads checked into five-star ones. It took Diana Edulji publicly calling out the disparity for the Indian team to be shifted to the same hotel as the visitors.
Then came 2017. Harmanpreet Kaur’s 171 against Australia at Derby broke through the indifference. India reached the final, and for the first time, women’s cricket became a dinner-table conversation. Overnight, Smriti Mandhana’s cover drive was replayed in advertisements, Mithali Raj’s calm became a cultural metaphor, and Harmanpreet’s six-hitting fearlessness made headlines. That campaign lit the spark.
Franchise Effect
If 2017 was the spark, the Women’s Premier League (WPL) in 2023 became the roaring fire. Sold-out crowds in Bengaluru and Mumbai, millions tuning in on TV, and sponsorship deals worth hundreds of crores gave women’s cricket its first taste of commercial validation.
Players who once scraped together train fare now went under the hammer for crores. The first edition itself crossed 700 million dollars in media rights. Players who once had to borrow bats now signed contracts worth crores. Stadiums filled to watch them. This was not tokenism. This was fandom.
Patriarchy Pushback
Progress, of course, comes with resistance. Even today, a section of cricket traditionalists sneer at equal pay and bigger prize pools, waiting to weaponize failure. This year’s World Cup offers a prize purse of $13.88 million; the highest in women’s cricket history, even surpassing the men’s edition. The fact alone has sparked debates in drawing rooms and WhatsApp groups.
But to measure women’s cricket only in money is to miss the story. For decades, players endured invisibility, indifference, and institutional neglect. Equal pay is not charity; it’s a long-overdue correction for generations who gave their sweat without return.
The World Cup of possibility
Now, in 2025, the Women’s World Cup returns to India and for the first time to Sri Lanka. Matches will be spread across Navi Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Indore, Guwahati and Colombo. For local girls like Shree Charani from Andhra Pradesh or Kranti Goud from Madhya Pradesh, this is not just a tournament. It is proof that the dream no longer ends at a district level. This is the moment when the hinterland can see itself on the global stage.
The cricket promises to be fierce. Australia remain favourites with their seven titles, but England, South Africa, and New Zealand all have squads hungry to break dominance. India, runners-up twice, have perhaps their best chance yet on home soil. Harmanpreet Kaur, at 36, may be playing her last ODI World Cup, but unlike Shantha, she has a team behind her that does not just want to compete but to conquer.
Beyond the boundary
Women’s cricket is no longer just about cricket. It is about reclaiming space in a world that once told Rachael Heyhoe Flint, “Girls don’t play.” It is about Shantha Rangaswamy hauling luggage into unreserved train compartments. It is about Diana Edulji demanding train fare reimbursements. It is about Harmanpreet’s 171 lighting up a billion homes.
This World Cup is more than a tournament. It is a milestone in a revolution half a century in the making. And if the stands in Guwahati and Colombo roar as loud as those in Melbourne or Lord’s, then perhaps, just perhaps, the world will finally realise: they were never playing “women’s cricket.”
They were playing cricket.