Just not cricket

The English Cricket Board has a serious woman problem and seems blissfully unaware or unaffected by the gathering strength of the double women’s rights storm brewing outside its boardroom doors. 

The tyrannical Robert Mugabe, once said, “Cricket? It civilises people. It creates good gentlemen.”

Mugabe understood the power cricket had to change the image of a nation, allowing a good reputation to be purchased to replace a bad one, through the playing of the sport; that a character or identity could be shaped into something more acceptable. His thoughts could not be more pertinent to the two-fold political crisis snapping at the heels of the ECB. 

This week it was revealed that the ECB have taken training in “inclusion” from a group called “Gendered Intelligence” about the need for men and boys (who “identify” as women and girls), to compete in female-only teams at grassroots level cricket. 

ECB policy currently excludes men and boys — saying they are “transgender” — from the elite women’s game. The elite game is suitably and appropriately protected, to ensure safety and fairness for female players, with only female players allowed on women’s teams. The transformative power of cricket, at elite level, does not extend to arguing the actual sex of players has changed. There are limits. 

At grassroots level however, Gendered Intelligence have been “training” the ECB in how to include male players in the female game. This is, in one respect, very “gentlemanly”. It seems very much that the misters are doing it for themselves, and women and girls are to be made unsafe within, or even elbowed out of, their own game by male players and their advocates. This is a convenient way to facilitate cheating under the guise of “inclusion” and the resulting exclusion of women from their own sport doesn’t seem to be a consideration. 

Women and girls are finding the game, and their “gentlemanly” treatment since the partnership of ECB with Gender Intelligence, rather rougher than Mugabe may have perceived it. Several girls have reportedly experienced actual danger from playing against some of these male players. A referee at one of the matches where a very tall and powerful boy was “included” commented to the coach that he would have ended the match early to protect girls from being injured by the boy. 

A look at the board of Gendered Intelligence is revealing. It doesn’t take special glasses to see through the elaborate pronouns on display in the profiles of the Chair and Head of Public Engagement to find two men. These men, and the many others scattered through the board, as though it’s a haven for aging death metal band members by the look of them, are advocating for the “inclusion” of men and boys in grassroots female cricket teams in total disregard of the safety of female players. 

The Afghanistan Cricket Team cannot legitimately be politically distanced from the country they represent

Cricket is not a contact sport, and yet grave injuries can and do result from the hurtling of an incredibly hard ball towards opponents. If that ball is being thrown or hit at an unexpectedly greater speed towards a woman, by a much more physically powerful male player who should not be there, then there is a huge problem and no “training” can curtail the risk.

It is alarming that the ECB have undertaken advice on who should play on women’s grassroots teams from such an ideologically driven group, who likely have little or no equivalent expertise in the mechanics of the game, especially regarding the safety of women playing it.

The ECB is being “educated” in how to exclude women from their own sport and provide places for men to be there in their place. They are being told they should not see a difference between the bodies of men and women, girls and boys and they are seemingly accepting that willingly. The logic of this would surely apply to the higher levels of the game. Male people are male, whether they are exceptionally good at cricket or not; being less good doesn’t make them womanlier. 

The ECB need to resist, not welcome, such ideological advances which put women and girls at risk of harm and deny them fair sport. It’s just not cricket. 

Alongside this grave dereliction of duty by the ECB on the grassroots pitches of England, the ECB is behaving equally egregiously towards women beyond our shores, when they continue to ignore the human rights abuses against women in Afghanistan.

As the ECB prepare to take their England men’s team out onto the ICC Championship Trophy pitch to play the Afghanistan men’s team in Lahore on Wednesday, there have been growing public calls for a boycott of the match. The Afghan team is widely seen as the propaganda arm of the Taliban, a regime with an escalating and brutal record of oppressing women in Afghanistan. 

To the Taliban it was very clear who the female cricket players were in 2021 when they seized power. They allegedly went door to door hunting for the International Women’s Cricket Team who subsequently fled the country to take exile in Australia and have struggled to play at all until very recently.

At the same time as the ECB are being persuaded by Gendered Intelligence not to recognise a difference between biological males and females in the English women’s game, they are being confronted by calls to take a moral position on the Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan. Gendered Intelligence may pretend that men are women, and the ECB may go along with them to some extent, but no one is attempting to “train” the Taliban in how to play Gender Bingo. Every man in the Taliban knows what a woman is when he wants to stone her to death, prevent her from speaking or take away her right to education. These are among the many human rights abuses being committed against women in Afghanistan.

Every man on the ECB board knows this is happening to women in Afghanistan. Individuals and women’s groups, including politicians have pleaded with them to boycott the match against Afghanistan on February 26 to show solidarity with the women of Afghanistan. They have refused, and stated that they will field an English team even though it “breaks their heart” to think of those women. 

Mugabe was astute about the transformational power of cricket and the Taliban recognise well the game’s ability to transform their globally stained national image through the sparkling white game beloved of gentlemen. They are determined to use the powerful tool of their cricket team in Pakistan over the coming days to whitewash their tattered global reputation due to their hideous treatment of women at home. 

Women, including myself, calling for the boycott have received death threats for our efforts. It is vital to the Taliban that we fail in obtaining a boycott, and it is vital to women of Afghanistan that they at least know we have been trying; that someone sees their lives as more important than cricket and that the world is not turning a blind eye to their plight.

The Afghanistan Cricket Team cannot legitimately be politically distanced from the country they represent, the regime of that country, or the way that women there are being treated. It is inhuman and immoral for the ECB to play any part in offering the Taliban a polished image on the world sporting stage, and if they play against the Afghan team this is what they will do. Cricket will effectively be used to “civilise” and excuse the Taliban’s treatment of women. According to Mugabe’s assertion, “good gentlemen” are being fashioned from Taliban monsters. 

If the ECB, as they say, are aware of the plight of women in Afghanistan and they choose to do nothing to support them, and simultaneously here in the UK they listen to men tell them that they must ignore the safety of women and they choose to do so, women can only conclude that cricket in the UK, under the government of the English Cricket Board, has ceased to be civilised, and is instead cruel and barbaric when it comes to their regard for women and girls.