In a development that is certain to add more heft to the idea of women\u2019s empowerment, five teams in India\u2019s new women\u2019s T20 tournament have been sold for US$572 million. This is truly the coming of age of women\u2019s cricket in India. The auction of the teams, which has left the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the governing body of the game that much richer, is being hailed as one of the biggest one-day bids in the history of women\u2019s sports.<\/p>\n
Even the foreign media reporting on cricket has admitted that the average price of the teams (US$114 million) has dwarfed valuations in more established American leagues and signalled the lucrative potential of the women\u2019s game in the world\u2019s richest cricket market. More importantly, with this the Women\u2019s Premier League becomes the latest test case for competitive women’s sports attempting to attract audiences and sponsors. They are now comparable with the most lucrative men\u2019s tournaments.<\/p>\n
This is being rightly described as a “landmark” moment for women’s cricket in India. India, now an acknowledged cricketing powerhouse, had been slow to develop women’s cricket. Women\u2019s cricket teams in India started making news much after countries like Australia and England had caught the attention of the world with their women\u2019s teams.<\/p>\n
Initially no one was willing to give women cricketers in India their due. They went mostly unnoticed. Even the merger with the men\u2019s cricket board in 2005 was also done rather reluctantly. There was considerable resistance to the move because the old order did not want the status quo to be disturbed by the emergence of women players. Hence India\u2019s women\u2019s team had to content itself playing second fiddle to the top two teams in the world, Australia and England. This continued for a while, with India slipping beyond West Indies to number five slot in the world.<\/p>\n
Then things began improving. India\u2019s cricket administration underwent a sea change with the Supreme Court stepping in and getting a Committee of Administrators (CoA) to administer the game. There was no stopping the women\u2019s game as former India captain Diana Eduljee was part of the CoA. Her sheer presence brought the women\u2019s game into focus. It started getting the attention it deserved at the top level.<\/p>\n
Now the Indian women\u2019s team is counted among the top teams of the world, with a record to be proud of. Several Indian players, including present captain Harmanpreet Kaur, are rated highly by cricket experts around the world. As the women’s team started getting noticed, money also started flowing in for the players \u2013 but it was never anywhere close to what the male cricketers earn. <\/p>\n
All this has changed with the latest auction for the women\u2019s premier league. This has paved the way for women into the money-spinning male-dominated Indian Premier League. This will be like turning conventional cricket on its head, with Indian women cricketers earning multimillion-dollar contracts for the first time. They have now well and truly arrived.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a development that is certain to add more heft to the idea of women\u2019s empowerment, five teams in India\u2019s new women\u2019s T20 tournament have been sold for US$572 million. This is truly the coming of age of women\u2019s cricket in India. The auction of the teams, which has left the Board of Control for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22996,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22994\/revisions\/22996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.testctsl.in\/indiafirstepaper\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}