Kanyaon ki cricket hogi, zaroor aaiye”. The yr England hosted the world’s first-ever ladies’s cricket world cup, this was the sound Lucknow’s bylanes heard blaring from a rickshaw. Microphone in hand, Mahendra Kumar Sharma aka Sharmaji, a softball coach in his 20s-was luring the locals to the Uttar Pradesh capital for the primary all-women cricket match. Keen to look at gamers in white skirts, round 200, mainly boys, turned up at a neighborhood women’ faculty in 1973.5 years later, round 30,000 would present up at stadiums in Calcutta, Patna, Delhi and Hyderabad to look at Indian kanyas compete with Australia, New Zealand and England.
Barely 5 years after Sharma registered the Girls’s Cricket Affiliation of India (WCAI), an English participant would watch her cricket whites being washed in Indian waters. Not many know that India not solely took half participated in but additionally hosted the second ladies’s WC. “It was determined that India was the very best venue to host the event as no different nation would be capable of pull any form of crowd,” writes Suprita Das in her ebook ‘Free Hit: The Story of Girls’s Cricket in India’ in regards to the ODI world event which got here two years after Indian ladies cricketers toured Australia and New Zealand in 1976.

By then, Bombay had lengthy boasted its personal kanyaon ki cricket and its personal feminine model of Sharmaji. Aloo Bamjee-a hand fan-toting Cricket Membership of India member-had acquainted the town’s softball-playing younger women with the season ball within the late Sixties. The circulars she despatched out to colleges and faculties drew a motley of schoolgirls schoolgoing siblings and busy bankers aged 16-23. Educated below the hawk eye of legends resembling Mohinder Amarnath, the ladies players-including the likes of Diana Edulji and Shobha Pandit-would quickly turn out to be family names.
Newspapers referred to the gamers as “the Eves” then. Funds did not come the best way of the Eves as simply as feedback did. Bats needed to be raised to silence crude remarks on the road, kits needed to be shared and compliments earned. “Do they bowl like males or do they only throw the ball on the wicket? Have they got particular gentle bat and ball? Are they able to hitting a boundary?” had been among the many questions those that didn’t witness India’s first nationwide ladies’s cricket event in 1973 in Pune requested those that did. They had been surprised when instructed that Pandit and Edulji not solely reduce and drove the ball to the boundary but additionally that batter Meena Thakkar lifted the ball so excessive throughout the event that it deserved a six.”We aren’t attempting to ape the boys. We play to our personal requirements,” English Girls Cricket Affiliation’s secretary Anne Sanders had mentioned months forward of the primary ladies’s cricket WC, which additionally occurred to be the world’s first cricket WC. Held within the UK two months earlier than the boys’s championship, it included groups from England, Australia, NZ, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Whereas the Indian ladies’s London goals didn’t materialise that yr, 14 groups travelled in unreserved bogies throughout the locomotive strike in December 1973 to compete within the second nationals at Varanasi.
Quickly, Bombay-born Kath McGready discovered would discover herself in India for a event in February 1975 as a part of the U-25 Australian squad which drew all of the Assessments performed. Later, India travelled to Australia and NZ for a tour, producing sufficient buzz-some studies say-to trigger India to be picked as hosts of the second WC. “It was the primary time we had been taking part in in a serious occasion with so many groups,” remembers former leg spinner Shubhangi Kulkarni in regards to the four-country championship that noticed gamers from England, Australia and NZ groups flying down.

Whereas India needed to get used to taking part in within the ODI format, the opposite gamers adjusted simply to going through performing in entrance of 30,000-strong spectators. “The opposite groups had been extra skilled since ladies’s cricket in these international locations had begun a lot earlier they usually had performed extra worldwide cricket. They had been additionally a lot stronger and fitter than us, which gave them a bonus in operating between the wickets and fielding. Since they practised on higher high quality grounds, their fielding was a lot better. I assumed we had higher cricketing abilities. Technically, our batters had been well-equipped and our spin bowlers had been higher than another. However health and energy had been the areas we wanted to work on,” says Kulkarni.
In a retrospective interview, English participant Megan Lear recounted that on a journey by practice to the observe floor, the group noticed the all-whites they’d handed to the lodge laundry being washed in a the native river and laid out to dry on the rocks. “WCAI supplied us with the complete apparel,” remembers Kolkata-based Gargi Banerjee, the previous teenage ‘twelfth man’ who performed within the center order in throughout the WC. Regardless of the dearth of sponsors, the WC event went off easily, although in the midst of India’s final recreation towards Australia, Edulji reportedly went and picked up the gate cash in money from the organisers-the results of negotiations with the WCAI, which had not paid the gamers for the previous few matches, mentions Das in her ebook. Although India The nation misplaced all of the group matches and noticed Australia exacted revenge for his or her first WC defeat towards England by taking dwelling the trophy in Hyderabad., Pandit received an opportunity to carry the trophy whereas the group travelled in a packed practice from Calcutta to Patna for a match. It seemed very very like the boys’s World Cup trophy, says Pandit, recalling the time earlier than Kapil Dev lifted the prize aloft in Lord’s.
“The ladies cricketers slog it out with no returns in any respect. We aren’t paid a penny for a Check match. If retained as skipper and given correct services together with one of the best aspect, I guarantee you we will carry the World Cup dwelling,” wrote Edulji earlier than the fourth ladies’s cricket world cup in Australia in 1988, which noticed gamers sporting chest numbers for the primary time. Disillusionment set in after India was not cleared for the fourth ladies’s cricket WC in Australia in 1988that event. “The prospects could not be gloomier,” Edulji mourned in 1992 when empty coffers, elusive promoters and dwindling gamers meant that ladies’s cricket suffered a retreat. The dearth of worldwide excursions between 1986 and 1991, other than paucity of help from the federal government and WCAI, brought on determined cries for a merger with BCCI.
In the meantime, a change of guard meant that Madras-based Quest Advertising Pvt Ltd was appointed as sponsor of the Indian group for the 1993 ladies’s WC in England, which noticed the nation end fourth amongst eight groups. 4 years later, 80,000 would flip up at Calcutta’s Eden Gardens for the finals between Australia and NZ when India hosted the sixth World Cup and located itself ousted within the semi-finals. Moreover a grand closing ceremony, highlights of this 1997 version included verbal dismissals by gamers resembling Australian Belinda Clark who broke quite a lot of information. When a reporter requested if she acquired ideas from males, Clark replied: “Quite the opposite, I provide tricks to them.” As we speak, a few years after BCCI’s merger with WCAI within the mid-90s, the fortunes of the ladies’s recreation prolong a lot past floodlights, flights and physio on name. “If I had been requested to guide the Indian aspect in the present day, I’d do what the Australians did,” says Pandit, referring to the pre-match kitty ritual she noticed whereas befriending batters resembling Deborah Martin and Lynette Smith in her time. “I’d have the group pool in cash for a kitty that’s distributed amongst gamers as a bonus for good batting, bowling and fielding. A participant that doesn’t do nicely loses out on the pocket cash they get for the day,” she says. “It teaches you to battle again.”