Notes From the World Cup: Flight Out

Final thoughts on an epic month

Nearly a week since the lights went out at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai, the sensation still lingers on, like confetti stuck on a drenched jersey. They actually bloody pulled it off. Every few hours, the mind saunters back. Not to the whole of it - that would be impossible - but to some dazzling fragments. Harmanpreet floating above the DY Patil turf, hands outstretched. Her six over covers in the semi-final. Deepti’s yorker to Annerie Dercksen. Shafali being Shafali and stepping out to Marizanne Kapp.

Social media has a way of giving these experiences a prolonged afterlife. This past week, my timelines have been a glow of blue and gold. Reel after reel carries the same faces in different scenes, pictures have become wallpaper-worthy “edits”.

Jemimah Rodrigues and Harleen Deol are rapping in a bus, dropping bars like, “Naam ke piche Kaur hai, log kehte isse Thor hai” (Her surname’s Kaur, people call her Thor). Someone replies with an older clip, the same singers and lyrics and subject, just a different life. Then there is one where Amol Muzumdar hands the World Cup to Radha Yadav’s father during the victory lap. A news agency video comes through from Rohtak, where Shafali Varma is welcomed with packed streets and garlands and music. Nitin Sharma from The Indian Express travels to Moga to meet Harmanpreet Kaur’s parents, who bring out the shirt they made for when she was born.

Picture credit: Gurmeet Singh, IndianExpress

Some wins in sport feel inevitable but distant, like the coronation of the royal’s elect. This was different. It felt communal. The triumph belongs to the team, of course, and to those who’ve walked that path before them, but it felt as though we were all in the stadium with them. Navi Mumbai 2025 will become larger than one match, a cultural high-tide for something we don’t yet have the language to describe.

I have since appeared on two different podcasts, aggregating to three and a half hours of freewheeling babble about the World Cup. The feeling was unanimous: we could talk all day and still wake up the next morning remembering something we forgot to mention.

Our memories from this tournament will forever be India-coded, but, with time, we will carve space for everything else. Sophie Devine’s incredible century against Australia, Linsey Smith against South Africa, Marufa Akhter, Nadine de Klerk, Phoebe Litchfield, fumigation breaks, last-ball thrillers, AC/DC on the speakers, and the inevitable genius of Alana King and Laura Wolvaardt. They made the tournament what it was.

Good world events turn a place into a party, a transient republic of noise and colour. At the World Cup or the Olympics, fans arrive with their own music and language, their own traditions, with face-paints and flags wrapped around their shoulders. Dutch fans take over Frankfurt; a percussionist from Sao Paulo holds a spontaneous concert in Marseille. And when everyone converges at a stadium, they turn the stands into a globalist mosaic.

Here, for all the skill on show, one had to squint to find non-blue shirts in the crowd. Often there were none. Travellers were obviously keen to come. But when they’re given twenty-six days to book tickets, maybe fifty to plan their travel, it’s all too rushed and expensive to follow through. Not to mention the semi-final and final tickets, which shuffled between available and sold out until about ten hours before the games.

This is still the India-centric view, where the wish was to see more travelling fans because the cricket was outstanding. Fans in Colombo were left wishing for some cricket itself. The R Premadasa Stadium hosted 11 games, five of which finished without a result thanks to a steady, stubborn rain.

New Zealand, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka were the worst affected. Sophie Devine, New Zealand’s captain, spoke earnestly to Sky Sports about the logic of placing games in Colombo during the receding monsoon period. With every viewing, you get a fresh look at her agony and her expertise at letting face and tone say what words cannot in public.

I wonder if the travelling teams will take back a sketchy memory of the tournament. The initial schedules must’ve looked absurd. They were given a list of non-major venues at first, which were changed, upon loud public outrage, to different non-major venues. The BCCI scheduled no games at the major Women’s Premier League centres, despite three years worth of turnout evidence. Even the DY Patil Stadium was a late invitee to the party, after the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore - itself a late addition - was removed because of the 4th June stampede. In the end, the crowd turnout at Guwahati, Indore, and Vizag papered over the organisational apathy.

And then, Indore. On the morning of October 23, two Australian players walking to a cafe were stalked and sexually assaulted by a motorcyclist near their hotel. Cricket Australia immediately raised it with the Indore Police, and the accused was arrested later that day. The police later revealed that the assaulter had ten prior cases against him.

The immediate responses were a lesson in institutional ignorance.

BCCI Secretary Devjit Saikia came in huffing and puffing, and said, “It is a very condemnable but stray incident. India is known for its hospitality and care. We have zero tolerance for such incidents.”

‘Stray’, in a country that averages one reported case of sexual assault every quarter of an hour. Worse still - most aren’t even reported, and amongst those that are, very few count. In her book Whole Numbers and Half Truths, Rukmini S finds, “India’s only official source of statistics on crime is the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). Instead of all the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections involved in an alleged crime making it to the statistics, the NCRB only picks the ‘most heinous’ crime from each FIR for their statistics.”

Up next on the mic was Kailash Vijayvargiya, a minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tasked with looking after urban development. Turning the lens back on the visitors, he said, “Players must keep in mind that when they leave their place, their security and local administration should be informed. Cricket players are very popular. They should also be careful when they go out to roam.”

The only measured response came from the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association, who said, “No woman should ever have to endure such trauma, and our thoughts and support are with those impacted by this distressing incident. This unfortunate event has deeply affected everyone from MPCA who cherishes the values of respect, safety, and dignity of women. It is truly inspiring to see the players rise above this painful experience and continue to compete with courage and determination, carrying the pride of their nation on their shoulders in the match against South Africa.”

The BCCI owes the Australian team one for not letting this incident mushroom into something bigger. We were back discussing the cricket within fifty hours.

As the days passed, it became clear that this World Cup was making its way into the public consciousness like no other women’s tournament before. The print coverage was exceptional, and the ICC digital media team backed it up with some stellar video content. It helped that India were in contention for the knockouts.

The final was watched by nearly 40,000 people live, and, according to this Cricinfo report, nearly 185 million on Jio Hotstar - equalling the viewership of the Men’s T20 World Cup final last year.

Credits: REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas

The Long Ride Here

In this essay, Zenia D’Cunha writes about the “long and arduous journey to get here, a journey of near-empty stadiums and thinly-attended press conferences, of being an afterthought in the wider world of Indian cricket,” she says. “The broad strokes are well known; the lack of resources and initiative by the authorities, the uncertain system, the caustic comments. But there were so many smaller, seemingly insignificant moments of absolute apathy that made you wonder, ‘Is this how a cricket powerhouse like India treats its national team?’”

There were times when the team couldn’t find a broadcaster to cover their games. A home tri-series with Australia and England was played entirely in the morning, robbing everyone of what might have been. Zenia further speaks about appeals by Snehal Pradhan and Sachin Tendulkar for the BCCIWomen Twitter account to reach 2000 followers. At the time of publication, that count is 1,056,016.

Necessity vs Luxury

The players have had no rest this week. The Prime Minister called the team over for a photo-op, where his skin care routine was brought up. State ministers have joined the queue, some with functions, many with cash rewards. Everyone wants a piece of the pie now, though most of them barely glanced at the bakery when its shelves were empty.

Through this World Cup, the BCCI, and especially Jay Shah, have been showered with praise as “great supporters of women’s cricket” and as the body that broke many ceilings by facilitating ‘equal pay’. Firstly, like Geoff Lemon put it so succinctly in this video: that’s the gig! The administrative heads of a sporting body are supposed to care about the women’s game - that’s half the fucking sport.

The annoying, exhausting ‘equal pay’ conversation stems from BCCI’s announcement in October 2022 that men and women cricketers would be paid the same money for a Test, an ODI, and T20 international. Its fine print lies in the retainer contracts: the lowest bracket in the men’s contracts is INR 1 crore per year, the highest bracket for the women is INR 50 lac per year. The women play far fewer games than the men, so the per-match pay parity counts for only so much.

The difference showed in the rewards too. The BCCI announced INR 51 crore ($5.7 million) as reward for the World Cup-winning team and support staff - less than half of what they paid the men when they won the T20 World Cup last year.

“The difference: of course, gender,” Sharda Ugra says here. “The ‘market forces’ argument is just a fig leaf used in and around the BCCI to pretend there are no sexist biases in place around the women in the game. Think about it: when the Sports Ministry announces cash awards for Olympic medallists, they do not say the men’s medallist will receive Rs X while the women’s medallist will receive X minus 60 percent.”

The next time you spot someone flaunting the pay parity argument, or the Women’s Premier League as a gotcha card against the women’s team, relay Sharda’s cutting lines here: “The BCCI’s more than very healthy bank balance is not the Sensex and the players, men and women, not stock options. They are resources to be nurtured and treasured and stakeholders to be engaged with.”

The Horizon

On November 27th, franchise owners from five Women’s Premier League teams will arrive in New Delhi to participate in the mega auction. Back in January 2023, these five teams were bought for a cumulative INR 4670 crores. This week, they announced their retained players for the next three-year cycle.

The WPL, already playing to sold-out stadiums for the last three years, will hopefully catch the slipstream of the World Cup win and attract even more interest. The first TV and broadcast rights deal fetched INR 951 crore. That should change to four digits soon. The Economic Times estimates the endorsement fee for the champions to soar by nearly 50%.

There ends the story of this World Cup, and there it will begin.

As we emerge from the afterglow of November 2nd, sunbathed and energised, it will be time to hold the BCCI accountable for the road forward. Without setting up strong foundations for the age-group, domestic, and developmental teams, this incredible win is guaranteed to be a comet event, instead of a spark that sets off an explosion.

The investment has to be bottom-up. For starters, fix the domestic cricket structure. Like Venkat Ananth says here, “The domestic season remains the starkest gap. It operates in fragments, squeezed between men’s tournaments and international fixtures. The BCCI increased its budget for women’s domestic cricket to Rs 96 crore for 2025-26, but scheduling conflicts persist. The men play year-round; the women wait for windows.”

Hopefully, the celebrations last a while longer, the videos and reels given a second and third life. But, alongside, it’s critical to bring out the magnifying glass, and see if the administrators truly throw their bank balance behind structure, or are they only interested in stroking themselves after a flash of success.