“You never really questioned what you were given in terms of equipment. You just took it as it was, and away you went. We never had a choice or we didn’t know that maybe we should have a choice.” – Lydia Greenway, former England captain.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
HOW many times have you been given out caught behind when all the ball has hit is the strap of your pad? Or been legitimately caught but only because the wristband of your glove has been trailing in the wind and flicked by the otherwise untouched ball? Or been run out because your pads are so voluminous, in relation to the rest of you, that it feels as if you are wearing a mattress on each shin?
If you’re a man, probably not often. If you’re a woman, no doubt more frequently. Women’s lower legs tend to be shorter and slimmer than men’s and their wrists narrower. Women’s and girls’ bodies are not men’s or boys’ in so many different ways. But all of them have to use the same equipment.
Unless female cricketers resort to shopping in the children’s section — where quality can leave much to be desired — they have to bat with surplus bits of straps poking out of gloves and disproportionately bulky pads, potentially curtailing innings, stealing runs and stunting careers. They might also earn unearned wickets, but the imbalance amounts to unfairness.
How are female cricketers supposed to reach their potential if the tools of their trade are not fit for purpose? Happily, the issue is being addressed by a surge in the amount of equipment made specifically for girls and women; a growing trend that goes beyond superficial design elements.
“It’s not just pinking it and shrinking it,” Lydia Greenway, the former England captain, told Cricbuzz. “It’s about which designs are appealing to females which might not necessarily already be appealing to males, and trying to recognise those differences. There’s a lot of good stuff going on.”
Established brands like Kookaburra, SM and Viking have introduced gear aimed directly at girls and women. Nexx arrived in 2021 “exclusively to meet the requirements of female cricketers”, the company’s site says. SM have collaborated with England captain Heather Knight to offer the HK range. Viking’s is called, inspiringly, Valkyrie.
“The bats are a lot lighter,” Greenway said. “A lot of manufacturers are trying to get them to around 2’ 6”, 2’ 7” [1.077kg to 1.106kg]. That’s the real sweet spot.” Some have “a shorter blade, but a longer handle. So the height of the bat is the same as a short-handle bat, but they’ve taken weight out of the blade by making it shorter.”
The ball women use could also do with an update. Currently, it weighs from 140g to 151g and has a circumference of 21cm to 22.5cm. In men’s cricket, those figures are 155.9g to 163g and 22.4cm to 22.9cm. Considering most men’s hands are considerably bigger than women’s, and that spinners comprise a bigger percentage of bowlers in women’s cricket, there is an argument for women to use a significantly different ball.
“You don’t really come across that many females spinners, compared to the men’s game, who can really rip it and bowl brilliant variations that turn as much as their stock delivery,” Greenway said. “I wonder if making the ball smaller, so spinners can get their hands around it, would be the way to go. But I’m not sure how happy the manufacturers would be with that.”
Greenway has her finger on this pulse partly because she runs The Female Cricket Store, an online equipment shop. If only it had been an option when she was playing: “This annoys me so much, and it was my own fault, but at the end of my career I had a bat that was too heavy for me. Looking back now and seeing a lot more of these lighter bats, I think, ‘Oh gosh, I could have generated more hand speed and had more control.’”
She played 225 matches — including 14 Tests — across the formats from February 2003 to March 2016 and was part of England’s world champion ODI and T20I sides in 2009. As someone who played her first serious game in the 1990s and stepped over the boundary for the last time in September 2016, she has lived through vast change.
“Females playing the game now compared to, say, 20 years ago is so different. Then, if a girl was playing cricket, they would have been introduced to the game probably by a male relative. You never really questioned what you were given in terms of equipment. You just took it as it was, and away you went. We never had a choice or we didn’t know that maybe we should have a choice.
“Now we’re seeing lots of different girls come into the game through different routes. The male relative is still there, but more and more we’re seeing girls get involved at school, or they’ve seen someone on the TV who looks like them and they’re saying, ‘Right, I want to play now.’
“What those groups of females want is something they can relate to and something they feel is suitable for them and actually specific to them.”
The idea is to make girls and women feel accepted in a sport that men, and some women, have tended to think was devised for boys and men. Greenway’s book, Women and Girls’ Cricket: How We Can Grow The Game Together, which was published in January, deals in part, she said, with the fact that “the amount of potential barriers to entry for females are probably higher than those for males. The equipment issue is hopefully easy to solve, as in not making it a barrier anymore. Having kit that has been made for women and girls will automatically make them feel much more welcome.”
This conversation extends beyond the obvious to subjects male cricketers never have to think about, whatever the girth of their calves or wrists. Like playing during menstruation. “If females are wearing cricket whites, sometimes it’s not ideal,” Greenway said. “It’s about giving them confidence to have something to wear, which they know they’d be fine in all day.”
A two-year-old company, Lacuna Sports, offers “teamwear” that makes provision for realities like breasts, waists, hips and periods, the latter in the form of “leakproof pants”. The clue is in the name: a lacuna is something that is missing or a deficiency. As in suitable clothing for cricket’s female players.
On the company’s site, founder Leigh Burns, writes that “two main negatives on whites” were discovered during research: “The risk of period leaks and looking terrible in cheap, transparent whites made for boys or men.” Burns was surprised that “not a single girl or woman we spoke to said they didn’t like whites. Many said they loved the idea of them. They just didn’t like wearing something ill-suited to their bodies.”
Cricket has a way to go before it reaches the levels of gender equality achieved in tennis, golf or athletics. But there is progress, and for now that’s what matters. “The great thing from my point of view is the brands are recognising this need now,” Greenway said. “People might think they’re small changes, but they can have a direct impact on performance.”
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