Three Weeks From the Carnival, Where's the Music?

The BCCI has just dropped their annual bestseller on how not to manage cricket

This Tuesday afternoon, during England’s ODI against South Africa, the electronic scoreboard at Headingley lit up with a colourful reminder of next summer’s main event: the Women’s T20 World Cup 2026. The all-uppercase banner was followed by the details of a website.

Screenshot from: ECB YouTube

Punch those letters into your browser and you’ll be greeted by a block of white-and-yellow text, telling you that the general sale opens on 18th September - 297 days before the first match of the tournament. This is standard practice for global sporting events. Tickets for the 2019 Men’s World Cup in England and the 2020 Women’s T20 in Australia were released nearly a year in advance. The 2026 Men’s FIFA World Cup will follow suit. Time allows for ballot rounds, flash sales, accommodation arrangements - the nuts and bolts of sports tourism.

In comparison, the ICC, chaired by one of our own, opened the ticketing for the 2025 Women’s ODI World Cup - starting 30th September in Guwahati - on 4th September. Twenty-six days. The schedule itself was released on 16th June. Three months, give or take, for fans to figure out tickets and travel.

Mrinal Asija, writing for The Guardian, finds chaos and frustration amongst hopefuls. Over an email, she tells me about a facebook group - Talking about Women’s Cricket -that has now turned into an anxiety hotbox thanks to the lack of clarity. “I'll be disappointed but certainly not surprised,” she says, “if there aren’t many supporters from Australia and other countries outside of the family groups.”

All this is a familiar, weary story.

It brings to mind the Men’s ODI World Cup in 2023, when the schedules and tickets were released so late, the euphoria turned into a mad scramble. Fans were herded into endless queues on the ticketing website, looking at slot numbers that induced engineering entrance trauma. Oftentimes, the website itself stopped loading. Those who secured tickets found flights priced at ransom rates; those who’d booked travel found matches sold out.

I remember sitting at home in Chennai, watching Jasprit Bumrah work the outer edge of Mitch Marsh’s bat, drowning my disappointment with some nannari sarbath, when I got a text that BookMyShow’s grey “Sold Out” button for the game had suddenly turned into blush pink.¹

It was an odd time, balancing the sadness of not getting tickets with the rage of spotting scattered pockets of empty seats on your screen every time India played. You had to join clandestine Telegram and Twitter groups to keep track of ticketing websites reopening in small windows. And once you were let in, you had to be both hawkeyed and lucky.

“There is no professional department for this within the cricket board,” Sharda Ugra tells me. “Normally, about a year before a World Cup, there should be an organising committee, a tournament director etc. The BCCI has something around cricket operations, but those people aren’t given adequate power. There is no love for the fans either. The terrible spectator experience, the lack of foresight with an event like this - they’re reflections of that apathy.”

This institutional apathy reveals itself one peel at a time.

But, we’ve been used to the BCCI. When a World Cup comes to town, you endure the rickety journey just to squeeze into the festival. India is hosting a Women’s World Cup, in either format, after nine years. Surely, surely, we’ll be up for it, right?

The proposed list of venues pretty much broke our daze. In March, the BCCI announced five cities for the World Cup: Guwahati, Visakhapatnam, Thiruvananthapuram, Indore, and Mullanpur. Of these, Mullanpur’s stadium was weeks old, untested. Thiruvananthapuram had never hosted a women’s international. Indore had hosted two, one of them in 1997 at a different stadium.

For three years, the Women’s Premier League had been filling stadiums in Bangalore, Delhi, and Mumbai. These cities, with their proven appetite and appreciation for the sport, were not considered for the shortlist. The reasoning, delivered with a straight face, was that the big metropolitan centres were already earmarked for the Men’s T20 World Cup in March 2026 - six months in advance.

Indian cricket’s venue-rotation policy is based on a weird, complex, opaque quadratic equation, one that the BCCI claims is built to take the sport far and wide. It exists only on paper, apparently governed by zones and associations, but bends reliably towards influence². The traditional cricket centres, whose fans have shown up in rain and sleet over decades, are left to pick at scraps. But when India faces Pakistan or a World Cup final needs a home, the compass needle swings back, unerringly, towards the orange fishbowl in Ahmedabad.

Outrage brought adjustments to ICC’s initial list. Bangalore was shoehorned in and Colombo was added for Pakistan’s matches. Then, following the terrible crowd crush at the Chinnaswamy in June, Bangalore’s games were divided between Guwahati and Navi Mumbai. The message, tucked between the lines, was hard to miss: the Women’s World Cup would have to accept its place in the hierarchy of Indian cricket’s priorities.

Thankfully, they’ve gotten some decisions right. The general tickets have been priced at 100 INR ($1.13). It will lower the barrier of access in cities where the pulse of women’s cricket is still being measured. The ICC have also announced that the prize money for this World Cup is $14 million - the highest ever for a Women’s World Cup, and more than the men got for the 2023 World Cup.

But a World Cup needs more than cheap tickets. It needs to exist in public consciousness. With less than four weeks remaining, have you seen a hoarding? A front-page splash, a television ad, a social media reel, anything? If you weren’t clued in, would you have known? Over the last couple of days, Hardik Pandya and Suryakumar Yadav’s new hairstyles have found more airwaves than Yastika Bhatia’s unfortunate and untimely knee injury. For the next couple of weeks, our attention will be overwhelmed by debates about India playing Pakistan in the Asia Cup, while the women go through their final prep sessions and an ODI series in relative silence.

The BCCI, for all its resources, has done little to put the Women’s World Cup front and centre. The men’s home Test season starts as the World Cup kicks into gear, so there is almost a greater need for a marketing blitz. Even the broadcasters, usually extroverted while making tone-deaf revenge edits for the men’s team, are still looping Kohli’s six off Haris Rauf. Chances are, they’ll cobble together a barf-inducing promo one week before the curtain-raiser and label it as effort.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Expecting better is, like Sharda tells me, rather naive.

In October 2022, Jay Shah, Secretary of the BCCI, stood before the world and announced a new dawn. Indian cricket, he said, had shattered the glass ceiling of discrimination by giving its men and women international cricketers equal pay. The women would now be paid 15 lakh INR per Test, 6 lakh per ODI, and 3 lakh per T20I. Shanta Rangaswamy, ex India player and captain, garlanded this with the words, “This shows how India treats its women and how there is no discrimination.”

For starters, the pay parity was only limited to match fees. The annual contracts bore no similarities, not even in the number of digits. On a podcast episode that dissects BCCI’s distribution of their money, Sharda Ugra, Swaroop Swaminathan, and my friends at PCCI - that’s not a typo - dedicate a section to the reality of these central contracts. You should listen to it whole, but let me transcribe a small passage.

“If you’re in salary band C, you get 10 lakh INR per year through your central contract, that’s 83000 INR per month,” Richa from PCCI starts. “Say you’re Yastika Bhatia. She’s in band C. Let’s say she wants to work on her power-hitting. With 83k a month, do you think she can buy more than a couple of bats, and then hire trainers, nutritionists? Are we setting them up for success?”

Sharda adds, “It’s staggering when you read these numbers. This is not a contract for a country that hosts one of the biggest leagues in women’s sport. What’s crazy is that there is no response to it. Because it’s women’s sport, when it comes to putting money where your mouth is, it just never turns up. For everything they say about being all for the growth of women’s cricket, eventually, the message that goes out is - ‘listen, we make a lot of money but there’s really no need for you to have that much of it.’”

Sharda also mentions in the episode how there isn’t a single woman in a powerful administrative post within the BCCI. There is, of course, no question of a players’ union because the BCCI have not entertained that thought even for the Y-chromosome cash cows.

Image credit: NDTV

Over a cloudy July afternoon in 2017, Harmanpreet Kaur changed the public profile of Indian women’s cricket. Against the all-conquering Australian team, in a World Cup semi-final, Harmanpreet scored whacked 171 unbeaten runs in 115 deliveries, shattering records and myths at an equal pace.

Suprita Das’ wonderful book, Free Hit, opens with a chapter dedicated to the aftershocks of this knock. She notes how Harsha Bhogle placed it on a similar game-changing pedestal as Kapil Dev’s 175 not out in 1983. Kapil, ever gracious, brushed aside the comparison and shone the spotlight back on Harmanpreet, calling it a special day for Indian cricket.

The final at Lord’s was sold-out before the semi-final even began, but a knock like this made it prime time TV. Everyone watched. India ended runners-up to England, and of course it hurt, but something had changed.

Or so we thought. The BCCI continued to drag its feet on launching a Women’s IPL, despite the clear success of similar leagues in England and Australia. Central contracts paid a pittance. Between August 2006 and June 2021 - fifteen years! - the Indian women’s team played just two Test matches. In 2024, when they brought South Africa over, the BCCI gave them a Test match in June, in Chennai, in the middle of a statistically treacherous heatwave.

We keep waiting for the shooting star, but when it streaks across the sky, we are busy pouring ourselves a drink. Someone else might play a knock like Harmanpreet’s soon. And our social media timelines will light up like the sky on Diwali night. Amitabh Bachchan will do a special segment on Kaun Banega Crorepati and narrate our pride in his deep, comforting baritone; the Prime Minister will video-call the team - with a camera crew to document it, of course; and influencers will make reels with emotional background audio. All will be right with the world.

One year from that, we’ll be back to square one.

The 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup swept up the nation in one giant wave of euphoria. The Indian team were incandescent, the atmosphere was pure carnival, and for a month and a half - right up until 2:45pm on 19th November - everything seemed to glow. The agony and the chaos of the lead-up has almost evaporated from public memory. So too has the fact that, for all its billing, there was precious little “World” in this World Cup. Remember how you had to squint to find travelling fans? By all measures, it was an Indian tournament, bathed in blue. That’s all you saw in the stands, on the streets, on television coverage and in the newspapers. By some distance, it was the worst-managed and tackiest World Cup in living memory.

I worry a bit of the same might happen this October. The Indian women’s team is great, and I’m confident they’ll play well. Navi Mumbai will turn up; I’d like to think the same of Vizag and Indore too. But when the dust settles, the BCCI, the BJP, and the ICC Chairman will publicly call it a triumph of administration, and internally parade it as precedent and proof that they don’t really need to care for fans or the sport, least of all the women’s game.

1. That day, Chepauk only filled up to 90% of its capacity - for a weekend World Cup game against Australia, mind you. It was a running theme for the entire tournament. In the final, at a stadium with a capacity of ~1,20,000, the official attendance was 92,453. I am not very good at math, but the calculator tells me it’s 75%. For a game of that magnitude, that number says a few things.

2. Sample this - since that epic in Calcutta, India haven’t played Australia in a Test match there even once. From the summer of 2017, neither Mumbai nor Calcutta nor Bangalore have hosted either Australia, England, or South Africa in a Test match. Meanwhile, Dharamshala - India’s most picturesque stadium, without doubt - found itself at the right end of the bottle spin game for three of the last four Australia/England tours. It’s not hard to tell why: the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association’s president’s list shows a few familiar names: Arun Dhumal, Anurag Thakur et al.