I was pleased to see the newspapers reporting England cricketer Kate Cross’ marvellous achievement when she took 8 wickets in a match at the weekend. For the non-cricket lovers that means one person has almost single-handedly won the match for the team, sort of, as much as anyone can ever simplify cricket to a single sentence. But, looking at little deeper into the story I started to see that it was not as it seemed.
Cross was playing in the Lancashire League, a sort of second division of cricket, but a very strong one where a number of England’s men have started their cricket careers over the years. And there’s the rub – Cross was playing with a men’s team, and it appears that this is what made the story newsworthy. ‘Woman plays with men’ – gosh, blow me down with a feather, it’s not as though that’s not been happening for years. In fact many of England’s female cricketers started their careers playing with men’s teams, or at the least their school boys’ teams. OK, so this is the first time in the 123 year history of the Lancashire League that a woman has played, but in my view that says more about the anachronisms of sport than anything else. And for this to be the only reason that Cross’ haul was picked up makes it even more galling.
As well as the need for a woman to be surrounded by men to get the headlines, I think what has made me even more uncomfortable is the need for Cross to play with a men’s team in the first place. Whilst there is a certain pleasure in seeing a woman good enough to take on the men – proving that brute strength is rarely the defining characteristic of a good sportsperson, I wonder if it starts to devalue women’s sport. If the over-riding ambition of a top-level sportswoman is to play with the men, does that not suggest that women’s sport isn’t good enough for them? Perhaps I’m being over-sensitive, and there aren’t many sports where this is likely to be an issue. But in a culture where women’s sport is already under-valued it feels as though we are doing the many successful sportswoman a disservice by celebrating only once a woman is playing with the men. Of course, one of the reasons for women choosing to do this is more than likely the lack of support and attention given to women’s sport by the media and sponsors. But then we risk a vicious circle – a lack of publicity of women’s sport leads to the best sportswomen looking to play with the men, leading to a lack of publicity for women’s sport.
It is far more complex than that I am sure, but I do feel uneasy at the whole story. No less credit to Cross for her amazing achievement – taking 8 wickets in any match is impressive, doing so against a generally stronger opposition, with the weight of history on your shoulders took guts. And there is of course no suggestion that she is abandoning women’s cricket. But surely our aim should be to raise the profile of women’s sport as a whole, and not just those individuals who manage to make it in a man’s world?
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