feminism – Bulletproof Truth

Test cricket is a woman’s game

“Just like ODI and T20 cricket for women, women’s Test cricket needs to be appreciated in its own right and not compared to the men’s game.” – Mignon du Preez

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WHAT’S the sound of one hand clapping? Mignon du Preez isn’t a Zen Buddhist, so she doesn’t use koan riddles to free her consciousness from the constraints of logic. But she has a decent idea of the answer to that question.

Du Preez has scored 13 centuries — including an undefeated 203 — in her 542 senior matches for provinces, franchises and South Africa. As an under-13 she made 258 in a 40-over interprovincial match, 196 of them in fours and sixes. Even so, the 102 she made against India in Mysore in November 2014 was unlike any of her other successes.

“India declared on 400, so I knew we would need big partnerships and that a couple of our batters would need to score big runs if we wanted a chance at chasing India’s total down,” Du Preez told Cricbuzz. “I think the biggest change for me was probably my mindset. I was a lot more patient at the crease and I wanted to bat time. However, if I could do it over again, I would definitely want to improve my strike rate.”

She batted for a mite more than four-and-a-half hours and faced 253 balls: a not exactly Bairstowesque strike rate of 40.32. That wasn’t why so few pairs of hands applauded Du Preez’ feat — there weren’t many hands at the Gangothri Glades ground in the first place, and no pairs of eyeballs watching from home.

“To score my maiden Test hundred in my debut Test, as captain, was really special; probably the ultimate dream Test experience,” Du Preez said. “Unfortunately at that time there was not big support for women’s cricket, so it was only in front of my teammates without the excitement of hearing the fans roar or even family being able to watch it at home as it was not televised or streamed back then. However, I am really blessed that I had the opportunity to experience the ‘pinnacle format of cricket’, as it’s referred to in the male cricket environment.”

That innings was special, and not just for Du Preez. In all of Test cricket only David Houghton has also scored a century on debut and as captain — 121 against India in Harare in October 1992; Zimbabwe’s inaugural Test. Du Preez might take comfort from the fact that Houghton’s strike rate was 37.57. There are many differences between the two players. One of them is that Houghton played 22 Tests while that match almost eight years ago was Du Preez’ first and last in the format, and her only first-class game.

Du Preez, who retired from Tests and ODIs in April, provided written answers to questions for this piece while she was on holiday in Greece. Good luck getting other male former Test captains or centurions or indeed players to do that. Unless, of course, money is involved. There isn’t a lot of it in the women’s game. What there is has been sunk into white-ball cricket, which has earned a place in the public consciousness not because it deserves to be there — which it does undeniably — but because administrators, broadcasters and sponsors have recognised its potential as a revenue source.

Women’s Test cricket? Not so much, not least because it is rare. The Mysore match was South Africa’s last before the game against England in Taunton, which started on Monday. It is the 144th women’s Test. Some 400 kilometres to the north and also on Monday the other England team beat New Zealand by seven wickets in men’s cricket’s 2,467th Test. The equations are less skewed in the white-ball formats: there have been 4,418 men’s ODIs and 1,280 women’s, and 1,580 men’s T20Is compared to 1,152 women’s. Men have played 94.48% of all Tests — partly because they had a head start of more than 57 years on women — and 77.54% of all ODIs, but only, relatively, 55.24% of T20Is. “Unfortunately I think it’s easier to market the shorter format of the game as it’s a lot more exciting and appealing to the fans,” Du Preez said.

Did that mean she thought Test cricket wasn’t all it’s routinely cracked up to be? You have read and heard, many times, something similar to Du Preez’ reply: “Look, Test cricket is not called Test cricket for no reason. You will get tested in all aspects of the game. However, I think we will have more appreciation for Test cricket the more we have an opportunity to play it.” Or at least be given the chance to play two-innings cricket more often. Currently, that doesn’t happen at all for women in South Africa. “Yes, I think it will help if they get an opportunity to play the longer format on a regular basis.”

The alternative would be to consider Test cricket purely a man’s game. “No, I don’t think we need to accept that,” Du Preez said. “Just like ODI and T20 cricket for women, women’s Test cricket needs to be appreciated in its own right and not compared to the men’s game.”

There’s a hint of swing there, a gentle admonition of the mentality that sees, before it sees anything else, that boundaries are shorter for a women’s game, that despite that they are not often cleared, and that no female bowlers are fast, even if that is how they are described. Many who can’t stop themselves from thinking those thoughts didn’t think, when they changed the channel from the Taunton Test to see how Emma Raducanu was getting on in her first-round match against Alison Van Uytvanck at Wimbledon on Monday, that they would be short-changed because they wouldn’t be able to watch more than three sets.

The deeper, darker question is whether people of a certain age and outlook extoll the virtues of Test cricket so much and so overtly because, unlike ODIs and T20Is and like an old-fashioned gentleman’s club, it doesn’t often involve women. That view is enabled by the fact that only Test cricket played by women is denoted as such. If it’s labelled “Test cricket” it isn’t explained that it’s men who are playing. It doesn’t need to be because, as we all know, or should know, that’s the norm.

And yet it’s the format, not the gender of those playing, that determines the level of complexity, drama and nuance on display. It’s simply Test cricket because, simply, it’s Test cricket, not because men are playing it. So if we disclaim some matches as “women’s Tests” we should do the same for “men’s Tests”. Or, better yet, remove the apologetic gender specific simper that says, in effect, “We’re calling this Test cricket, but …”

Marizanne Kapp’s 150 at Taunton on Monday, the highest score by a No. 6 in a women’s Test and the highest by any South African woman, is no less an accomplishment because it wasn’t achieved by a man. Indeed, that she was able to perform as she did even though women play so few Tests is a powerful argument to the contrary. Strike rate? A healthy 70.42.

Happily, there were thousands of pairs of hands in attendance to give voice to those truths. But in the silence that followed the applause there was time and space for a more sobering thought: how many fine innings might we have seen from Kapp and Du Preez had South Africa been deemed worthy of playing more than two Tests in almost eight years?

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Why women lag in cricket’s gender race

“That’s the sort of thing that is going to get you sometimes because there’s no third umpire.” – Lizelle Lee explains how dodgy umpiring affects women more than men.

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WOMEN’S international cricket doesn’t get the attention it deserves at the best of times. What chance does it have of garnering its share of the spotlight in the worst of times? That is, when men are crowding the space.

In Antigua this month, South Africa shared a series of three T20Is against West Indies and then whipped them 4-1 in the ODIs. But half of those eight games were played on the same days as the men’s team took on Sri Lanka in Colombo.

So media coverage of the women’s series left much to be desired, not least because mostly the same reporters who wrote about the men would have had to write about the women, too. Something had to give.

Why couldn’t those priorities be reversed? Because whatever lip service is paid to playing fair in cricket’s battle of the sexes, the men’s game remains the top priority: the interest in their matches brings in revenue for boards and media houses alike. And money is what it’s about for boards and media houses alike. Until women’s cricket earns significant amounts, don’t expect that pecking order to change.

But how does it change if cricket played by women is so much more out of sight, and thus out of mind, compared to that played by men? Broadcasters are not going to pay boards more in rights fees for a product they know advertisers consider second-rate because it doesn’t garner as much coverage as another product. Whether women are more skillful than men or whether their matches are more exciting doesn’t matter. What matters is that more people are interested in men’s cricket.

It’s cynical and unfair, and, gentle consumer of the game, it’s your fault. If you paid more attention to women’s cricket — by offering your eyeballs and giving your clicks to their games more often — that wouldn’t be the case. The money would move, and with it cricket’s centre of financial gravity to a more level status.

Or is it the fault of the boards and the media? You can’t watch or read about what you can’t find, and women’s matches are relegated so far down the ladder by both the suits — in their marketing — and cricket publications that they are all but invisible except at tournament time. So much for all that lip service. The market shouldn’t get what the market demands just because the market demands it.

What did Lizelle Lee think about having to compete with men in this discriminatory way? Not a lot. “If we’re on a tour we have a job to do, and we make sure we do it,” she told an online press conference on Tuesday. “It’s great that the men play and they get all the exposure, and we support them all the way. But that’s the last thing we think about.”

Perhaps that’s easy for Lee to say. She’s a star performer in a team that has won six of their last seven white-ball series and drawn the other. When you’re part of creating powerfully positive truth, who cares if not enough people know it? That’s their loss.

But the way the ODI series in Antigua ended illustrated the difference between men’s and women’s cricket. With the scores tied and a ball left in the match, Mignon du Preez tried to scramble a single off Deandra Dottin. At short midwicket, Shakera Selman dived and flicked the ball to Dottin, who broke the wicket.

Although Joel Wilson was poorly positioned at about 45 degrees to the crease and had a tight call on his hands, his finger went up almost before the bails came off. Cue the first super over in women’s ODIs and only the third in all of cricket, in which the Windies prevailed. Why wasn’t the runout decision referred? Better question: to who?

“That’s the sort of thing that is going to get you sometimes because there’s no third umpire,” Lee said. “A few players thought ‘Minks’ might be in, but you can’t sit on the sidelines and think it’s in or out. That’s just something you have to deal with.”

Not if you’re a man playing for a major international team. In that world, DRS is called on to parse, often painstakingly, the difference between bat, crease and when, exactly, bail parts company with stumps. The implication is that men’s cricket is more important than that played by women, and therefore worth spending more on to ensure correct decisions are made.

If there is an upside to the relative smallness of the women’s game, it’s that players are more open to speaking their minds. When millions are watching and much is on the line in sponsorship terms, too many demure and tread diplomatically.

Certainly, Lee’s refreshingly bracing take on the concept of the super over is something few of her male counterparts would dare make public: “It’s definitely something that shouldn’t be in an ODI. Six balls can’t decide an ODI. I totally disagree with that. I don’t think it should have happened. In T20Is anything can happen — if you play a bad game you lose, if you play well, you win. ODIs are more about skill. You have to adapt to the conditions, and there are longer periods of batting and bowling. But it happened and it is what it is.”

Wouldn’t Kane Williamson, or any New Zealander, have been itching to say exactly that after England burgled the 2019 World Cup final in a super over? No doubt. But Williamson plays for that other kind of team: win, lose, draw or tie, it’s always the best of times.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Bring back the boycott

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt.

TELFORD VICE in London

HANDS up if you remember the long summers and winters of empty ache while, far away across the world, seasons runneth over with international sport played by people who were not us.

The way white people spat the words “Peter” and then “Hain”, the shameless lying in the press and on air that the dross dished up on rebel tours was Test cricket and rugby, the Springboks shamefully allowed to keep touring and playing long after the extent of the evil was known, the denial writ large on the blank faces of the delusionists pretending all was normal …

I remember. I was there. I lived through it. South Africa’s forced exclusion from world sport was the white noise of my growing up. I could hear the black noise of anger on the street. At least, I could before it dissipated into the smell of fear as state oppression mounted.

The Olympics? Test rugby and cricket? International football? They were for other, supposedly better people. Not for us.

I knew that was as it should have been. That until all South Africans had the same chances in life — not only in sport — the least the rest of the world could do was not allow the apartheid government to, as we say these days, sportwash the murderous truth away.

Politics was sport. Sport was politics. Is, was, always will be. Anyone who believes differently is, at best, stupid, at worst, on the high road to fascism. That offends you? Noted.

I cheered like mad during the 1981 Bok tour to New Zealand — for the protestors. I grew taller with pride every time my father, someone I was irreparably distanced from in all sorts of ways, defiantly and in the face of vicious opposition loudly supported the man he always called “Clay”.

He did so not because Muhammad Ali was a wonderful boxer. He did so because Ali invariably said and did the Right Thing. That my father was an ardent student of the art and craft of smacking someone in the face for a living but knew that Ali’s political bravery was exponentially more important than anything he would do in the ring has shaped me in ways I’m still, at 53, trying to understand.

And here we are, all these years later, and not nearly enough has changed. We still don’t have democracy. What we have is a pretence of democracy for the five minutes it takes to put a cross on a ballot paper every five years.

That’s for those of us who still bother to vote. The rest of us know that’s a waste of time. Whether we vote or not, the government will run on corruption and stink of ineptitude. Just like it did when it was white — when none of the legally available alternatives were noticeably less corrupt and inept, just as they are now.

Too many of us believed the bullshit of the 1995 rugby World Cup. That wasn’t unity. That was marketing. Nelson Mandela was dangerously wrong: sport does not have the power to change the world. Not, at least, for any longer than it takes the cheesy fakery of a beer commercial to shamble across our television screens. That’s even less than the five minutes we fool ourselves, every five years, that we’re a democracy.

The Springbok is the swastika of sport, the symbol of what white supremacy used to do on Saturday afternoons. Yet there the filthy thing still is, leaping on the left sleeve of the jerseys of the team who will, so they have been sold to us, represent South Africa at the men’s World Cup.

Why has the Springbok survived? Because it is a valuable brand. Because it makes money. That it is also a significant part of the story of the depths human depravity has sunk to matters less, apparently. How does that make you feel? How does it make me feel? Sick.

I would feel better if international rugby’s suits, having been reminded this week of how abnormal South African society still is and will be for too many decades hence, threw the Boks out of the World Cup.

Or if India — important figures in South Africa’s expulsion and readmission to international cricket — uninvited the Proteas to their tour there later this month.

At least Zambia have had the balls to tell Bafana Bafana not to turn up in Lusaka for their friendly on Saturday. The South African Football Association’s response has not been to reflect on why that has happened and to empathise with the Zambians, but to try and find replacement opposition. How completely disgusting.

Worse, Banyana Banyana played Botswana in the CAF Olympic qualifiers on Wednesday. It is an outrage that the match went ahead — could the players and the crowd at Orlando Stadium smell the hate drifting in on the smoke from the fires set by the xenophobes they consider compatriots?

How do you talk sense into the heads of people swept up in the irrationality that those who have come from far worse realities than theirs to make lives no-one wants to live are stealing “their” jobs and “their” women? Black South Africans, you are a disgrace.

But you have a way to go to join white South Africans at the bottom of the barrel. There is no reconciling with people who, having done everything wrong for hundreds of years, think they have the right to be treated as equals despite retaining all of their privileges.

The latter calamity has, of course, led to the former. How could it not? And how did we think the main victims of centuries of systemic, institutional racial violence — black men, without whom colonialism and apartheid could not have existed — would manifest their dysfunction if not against women?

All that’s more pathetic than women calling for the death penalty for perpetrators of gender-based violence is men seeking to distance themselves from those perpetrators by issuing confections of affront at their actions.

Some women seem to think you should go to jail if you kill a man and be executed if you kill a woman. But only if you’re a man. Nevermind that the death penalty doesn’t work, or that men are far more likely to be victims of male violence than women.

As for the shrieks of protest by men about other men, if you had lived their lives would you be that different? Or are you trying to say that being born black and male means being born bad?

Much of the noise made by these men and women rises from that swamp of affluence we call the middle class. How dare we lump these fine citizens with those other, dirtier, poorer South Africans? How could we possibly equate swinging a panga in anger with the lethal buzz of an electric fence securing ill-gotten gains?

South Africa’s problems are all South Africans’ problems. Not one of us is innocent. All of us are guilty. We need to own that guilt if we are to have any hope of rehabilitating ourselves.

It will take a lot more than sport to heal South Africa. But reviving the boycott would be a start. It is the least sport could do. Bring back the boycott now and bring it back properly, and to hell with how much money would be lost and whose careers would be cut short.

Hands up if you’re quietly aghast to be South African but will make noise in support of the Springboks at the World Cup?

Shame on you.

Dad? Thanks.

First published by Times SELECT.