The unpublished article and the coming of age of Indian women’s cricket

In June 2009, I was in business school. A friend at the Board of Control for Cricket in India, once a colleague in the newsroom, called and asked me to profile each member of the Indian women’s cricket team. The Indian cricket board, still in the early years of governing women’s cricket, wanted to feature these articles on its website before the ICC T20 World Cup in England. The pieces were never published. (I never got paid either.)

Today, there are more than a handful journalists who cover women’s cricket with the same rigour and dedication the men’s game has witnessed. If you log on to the BCCI’s app, you’ll see smartly packaged video interviews of the players, and on Instagram you’ll find the “indiancricketteam” handle is shared between men and women.

If you drive around in Mumbai these days, you’ll see many billboards featuring India’s women cricketers, many of whom have become household names. I share this not with the expectation of a settlement from the BCCI, but as evidence of the ground women’s cricket has covered in recent years.

I was at the Wankhede Stadium on April 2, 2011, when MS Dhoni lifted the World Cup. And I was at the DY Patil Stadium...

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