The Cambridge wind had a February chill, and the trees at Fenner\u2019s were still without any spring decoration, but the old bleachers to the side and the pavilion, largely unchanged since the 1980s, were reminders of a new season just a turn of the calendar away.<\/p>\n
Fenner\u2019s cricket ground sits next door to Hughes Hall, where the Cricket Research Network held their third annual conference last week. The organisation, headed by Raf Nicholson, sometimes of this parish<\/a>, is a place for cricket academics to exchange ideas, and the conference a chance for rest of us to put an ear to the door of data and detail.<\/p>\n Of the many fascinating presentations, the most eye-popping, at least to someone untutored in Chinese sport, was from Max He, who had come all the way from Xi\u2019an Jiaotong University in Shaanxi province, in the north-west of China.<\/p>\n He told of a world turned upside down, where cricket is seen as a female sport and one that absorbs not only the resources, but also the glory and the story-telling \u2013 both anecdotally and officially. The women\u2019s team play more games, have more staff, win more matches. They practise more frequently on turf wickets, train more abroad, have better experienced coaches. In reports, women are referred to as \u201cthe Chinese team,\u201d while the men are defined by their sex and treated as something of a joke, the upended version of Len Hutton\u2019s 1963 opinion on women\u2019s cricket: \u201cAbsurd, like a man trying to knit.\u201d<\/p>\n State feminism in Chinese elite sport, said He, \u201cis underpinned by the logic that medals are gender neutral units of political capital and the means for international recognition. Over time, this creates an instrumental equality, the promotion of women\u2019s sport as an efficient pathway to maximise China\u2019s performance in the global medal race.\u201d<\/p>\n The direction of Chinese sport changed after they came back with only five golds from the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He told of how the General Administration of Sport of China then decided to invest in sport according to the \u201cfive-word principle\u201d \u2013 small, fast, women, water and agile.<\/p>\n One female player consoled a teammate: \u2018It\u2019s all right, men cannot win a single game.\u2019 Photograph: Power Sport Images\/Getty Images<\/p>\n The glittery dividends have become clear. In the last four summer Olympics \u2013 London, Rio, Tokyo and Paris \u2013 China have won 143 golds, 62.2% of them around female necks. Women have also made up the majority of the athletes on Chinese teams \u2013 peaking at Tokyo, where 69.1% of the Chinese team were female.<\/p>\n Though China won\u2019t make the six male and female teams due to play in LA as cricket returns to the Olympics after a 128-year hiatus (the five highest-ranked nations in Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa and the Americas plus a global qualifier), the possibility of a future place, if the competition widens, dangles in the wind. While the women\u2019s team are hardly threatening the world order, lying in 45th place in the latest ICC rankings of T20 nations, the men\u2019s team languishes in 91st, squeezed between Saint Helena and Lesotho.<\/p>\n The treatment and self-image of the two teams is such a role reversal of the norm that when He quoted from Chinese players it provoked laughter in the room, a kind of guilty shock that will be familiar to anyone who has read The Power by Naomi Alderman<\/a>. One Chinese female player interviewed complained that the men \u201cnever win a single game in the Asian Games\u201d and another felt that \u201cwomen deserve more opportunities\u201d. A third, after losing a game, said she \u201cfelt better after a teammate told me: \u2018It\u2019s all right, men cannot win a single game\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Mohammad Ramzan, who played one Test for Pakistan in 1987, and is now the coach of the Chinese men\u2019s team, told He: \u201cWe never play any (T20) matches since the 2024 East Asia Cup. Not a single one. Ladies play four or five matches in June (2025) in Japan, and played against some good teams here [at Hangzhou ZPU cricket ground].\u201d<\/p>\n A woebegone male player perhaps summed up the group spirit: \u201cIt is rational to invest in women more as men have little hope.\u201d It is a dynamic that He summed up as \u201cgroup charisma and group disgrace\u201d with female cricketers emerging as the established team, albeit in a sport that is not a priority either for the Chinese Communist party or the people. The worldview was further twisted by a former women\u2019s coach telling He that the ICC are dissatisfied with China\u2019s strategy of \u201callocating too many resources to women\u2019s cricket\u201d and \u201cnot developing cricket seriously\u201d.<\/p>\n This inverted version of the game floated like a lost piece of a jigsaw above the rest of the conference, as a succession of speakers examined women\u2019s cricket in other places around the globe. Delegates were asked to consider whether the professionalisation of the women\u2019s game was going to end up with women being sidelined, as they were when the ECB swallowed up the Women\u2019s Cricket<\/a> Association, as well as looking at the legacy of this summer\u2019s World Cup and the experience of rapid professionalisation and The Hundred on female players.<\/p>\n There was also an examination of the pinkification of the Women\u2019s World Cup final at the MCG in 2020<\/a>, by Hannah Thompson-Radford, while Anand Rampersad from the University of West Indies opened the door on the development of women\u2019s cricket in the Caribbean. This included the elbowing out of the West Indies Women\u2019s Cricket Federation pioneers and how the frailty of the women\u2019s game hid behind the triumph of the 2016 T20 World Cup<\/a>. A narrative that somehow seemed more familiar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Cambridge wind had a February chill, and the trees at Fenner\u2019s were still without any spring decoration,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518148,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-518147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}