sexism – 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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Men make women see black

“If you bring women together and you give them one goal, greatness will happen.” – Suné Luus

Telford Vice | Cape Town

WHILE Faf du Plessis was holed up in a Karachi hotel room on Saturday his compatriots were taking on Pakistan in an ODI at Kingsmead. Not that they were dressed like a South Africa team. They were all in black, as if they were a New Zealand white-ball side. But their names gave their nationality away: Laura Wolvaardt, Mignon du Preez, Marizanne Kapp, Shabnim Ismail, et al.

Why the change from the usual green gear? Because of the evil men do, and an effort to combat it. “Black Day” is a CSA initiative to raise the alarm about gender-based violence (GBV), an epidemic in South Africa. The World Health Organisation says femicide — the murder of women and girls because of their gender, and almost always committed by men — accounts for the deaths of 12.1 out of every 100,000 women in the country every year. That’s more than four-and-a-half times the global average of 2.6, and it’s only one of the shocking statistics on the apparent addiction South African men have to GBV. Another is that a woman is murdered every three hours in this country. Still another that someone is raped or sexually assaulted in what Interpol calls “the rape capital of the world” every 25 seconds.

“From a male perspective it’s really important that we create awareness on this,” Du Plessis told an online press conference. “It’s something I don’t take lightly. It’s not just a women’s problem in our country. It’s an ‘us’ problem in South Africa. Especially as males, we need to be better. If you look at the stats on gender-based violence in South Africa it is insanely ridiculous. It’s one of the most important things in our country that we as males need to do better; that our country becomes more aware of what’s actually going on and how bad that situation is. I’ve had lots of conversations on this specific topic. I want to learn as much as I can. The more you speak about it the more your jaw drops because of what’s going on in South Africa. This is something we as the men’s team can get involved in on a much higher scale.”

Suné Luus, who captained South Africa on Saturday in the absence of the injured Dané van Niekerk, told an online press conference last week: “This is such a big day for us, to help educate the people of South Africa and whoever is watching all over the world. That we as the Proteas and CSA stand against this is an important message. We’re trying to help wherever we can and make a difference. If you bring women together and you give them one goal, greatness will happen. That’s the vision for Black Day.”

Women’s Criczone, an online magazine, quoted Mignon du Preez as saying: “We have an opportunity to speak up against GBV and we want to really break the silence about violence and abuse. We know it’s family, friends … mothers, daughters [who go] through this. We really want to encourage men out there to also stand up, have a voice and be gutsy to speak up about it as a very sensitive topic. We need to take the lead and be role models and set good standards for our kids and encourage them to continue to live a life of respecting women.”

A CSA release quoted Mary Makgaba, the chief executive of People Opposing Women Abuse, a non-governmental organisation, as saying: “A nation which undermines the rule of law and does not protect women and children from acts of domestic violence, sexual violence, emotional violence, financial violence, physical violence and femicide is not a winning nation.”

That a high profile man should speak on the subject is at once right and part of the problem. Du Plessis is correct to say men are central to eradicating this tendency among South Africans. Misogyny, driven by cultural and religious prejudices, is rampant in all communities and at all socio-economic levels of the country’s deeply patriarchal society. South Africa’s constitution enshrines equality, but the document has little impact on the daily reality of the citizens whose lives it purports to govern. So it is sensible to enlist men in the fight against a scourge of their own making.

But some will wonder whether men will only take the issue seriously if a man demands their attention. They will point to the violence of another kind meted out to Candice Warner at St George’s Park during Australia’s tour in March 2018 — when spectators wore masks depicting a former lover’s face to try and bait her spouse, David Warner — as evidence of dangerous attitudes and behaviours in South African cricket. If those men could so brazenly abuse a woman they had never met, what would make them not beat up, rape and murder the women and girls in their lives?

Questions like that are a long way from being asked, nevermind answered. But at least Du Plessis has joined the conversation.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Lions get it wrong trying to do the right gender thing

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in London

THE Lions struck a blow for gender equality on Monday by naming a woman as the Wanderers’ new public address announcer.

But they also shot themselves in the foot by making the news public in a release tainted by language that could be construed as sexist and misogynist.

“The beautifully bright and bubbly Poppy Ntshongwana will be the voice you’ll hear when present at the [Wanderers] this season,” the statement started, adding that Ntshongwana, a former 5fm presenter, “understands the game of cricket”.

Men involved in cricket in similar capacities are never subjected to frivolous personality descriptions and would not have their knowledge of the game defended as if it was anticipated that their expertise would be questioned.

Asked for comment, Lions chief executive Greg Fredericks said: “I raised this with our marketing manager [Wanele Mngomezulu] and he informed me that the person in question approved the press release.

“I do not think the intention was to be offensive or sexist but I have asked our marketing manager to be sensitive to all when he drafts such releases.”

The statement was disseminated by Cricket South Africa (CSA), who were asked if that meant they endorsed its contents.

“We send releases on behalf of all our unions because we have a wider reach with our media database,” a spokesperson said.

Leading Edge: We need to think carefully about how we talk cricket

Woman cricketers talk about themselves as batsmen. Do we respect their right to self-identify, or do the logical and call them batters?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in London

BATSMEN or batters? Pitches or wickets? Groundsmen or curators? Chinaman bowlers or left-arm wrist spinners? South Africa or Proteas?

Or all and any of the above? It’s time to revisit the way we talk about cricket. Or is it?

Old-fashioned cricket writers change every “batter” players and coaches utter in press conference and interviews to “batsman” in their articles. Why? “Batters play baseball, son, not cricket.”

But what if the player holding the bat is a woman? She’s clearly playing cricket, not baseball. She’s also not a man. Batswoman? Good luck with that.

It doesn’t help that woman cricketers talk about themselves as batsmen. Do we respect their right to self-identify, or do the logical and call them batters?

In which case the same should apply to men and to hell with what the old farts of the pressbox think: batters all.

Just such an old fart, the late, almost always great, never boring Trevor Chesterfield would screech across the room, in his falsetto voice barbed with a New Zealand accent that never flattened despite the decades he spent in South Africa: “It’s a pitch, ya bloody troglodyte — the wicket is those five bits of wood standing up at either end.”

And he was correct. On a bad day he would also call you a “bloody drongo”. On a good day he would explain that surface was an acceptable alternative to pitch. But you would hear from him, loudly, if you called it anything else: deck — “Oi! Drongo!” — track — “Shaddup troglodyte!” — strip — “What the hell? Keep your bloody clothes on!”.

Chester Trevorfield, as he was called by visiting compatriots, would insist that the last runs to be added to the batting team’s total were called sundries. The rest of us called them extras and reminded him he was tallying a scorecard, not a laundry bill. Bloody drongo.

Groundsman is on the same path to extinction as batsman. Except that they’re called curators in Australia, which won’t sit well with non-Australians — who will argue that if we follow that example we should also say the score the wrong way round. And go nuts as a nation when people are caught ball-tampering.

Besides, proper curators are found in museums attending to dead things — just like your pitch, hey boet? More contemporary specimens of the ilk drape themselves around chronically cool cafés, pouring over leather-bound laptops and “curating” exhibitions of the tattoo scabs of other, slightly less obscure hipsters.

Chinaman is a derogatory term and should you use it without that qualification you are practising racism. Should you be ignorant of that fact when you employ this epithet, you are guilty of preaching racism.

The C-word was racist long before it came to cricket at Old Trafford in 1933, when West Indies left-arm spinner Ellis “Puss” Achong — the first test player of Chinese heritage — had Walter Robbins stumped.

Most of Achong’s deliveries were of the orthodox finger-spin variety. But he slipped in the odd bit of wrist spin, and the ball that dismissed Robbins pitched near the right-hander’s off-stump and turned towards middle to sneak between his legs untouched was just that.

“Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman,” Robbins is reputed to have muttered to West Indies’ captain Learie Constantine as he stalked off.

The pejorative implication of Robbins’ alleged statement clangs loud and clear. Good thing someone of Constantine’s classiness was on hand to see his prejudice and raise the stakes, again reputedly, with: “Do you mean the bowler or the ball?”

This old fart of a cricket writer balks at using Proteas because it is insipid marketing-speak for a team who already have a name.

But South Africa is the geographic and ethnographic name of a country, and sport becomes part of a greater evil when it is hijacked by illusions of patriotism or dangerous nationalism. Just as it does when it is appropriated by people who measure success in the amount of money made from selling branded replica jerseys.

So, what exactly do we talk about when we talk about cricket?

Women go beyond cricket’s boundaries, but are still behind in the bank

“We’ve got a batting specialist! A bowling coach! Someone who does the fielding! A media person at hand!” – Mignon du Preez gets excited about things male cricketers take for granted.

STARSTRUCK – The author gets up close and personal with Anya Shrubsole, “cricket’s finest bowler, bar none”.

Sunday Times – Insight

TELFORD VICE in London

CRICKET yelled loud and lurid from a television in a buzzing Pakistani-run barbershop on busy Bethnal Green Road in London’s East End last week.

Live from Karachi in urgent Urdu, Express News’ lead sport story revealed all about movements up and down the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) rankings. The tale unfolded in slick scrolling stills of star players augmented by gaudy graphics and graphs. A woman’s voice bounced brightly, explaining it all, over hard-driven pop rock.

And in other news … Dull, soundless training footage appeared of the Pakistan team shuttling up and down a nondescript outfield. Cut to a short soundbite featuring one of them, uncaptioned. There were no graphics or graphs and no music, and the script was read off the teleprompter by the male news anchor — confirmation that the item wasn’t considered important enough to be, as television types say, “packaged” into a standalone piece.

The first story was about male cricketers, the second about the Women’s World T20 (WWT20), which is underway in the Caribbean.

That a woman should be used to embellish — excellently, it sounded — the rankings piece and a man assigned what he clearly considered the chore of prattling passionlessly through the WWT20 story was lost in the electronic ether.

A good three minutes was devoted to the men. For the women, there was no wham, there was no bam, and it was thank you, ma’am, in maybe a minute-and-a-half.

The only men’s international on the go at the time was the second test between minnows Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in Dhaka. In the preceding hours of the same day in the WWT20, England and South Africa had beaten Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Three matches had been played the day before, another was washed out, and two more would follow the next day.

Yet the nonsense of who was where in the rankings — no serious cricket person pays much heed to that gumph, which exists only to lure sponsors and help reporters out of a hole when they have nothing relevant to write about — was deemed worth telling before and better than what was happening at a world event.

Note the qualification in that event’s title. How come no-one talks, writes or broadcasts about the Men’s World T20, the Men’s World Cup, or men’s Test matches?

Express News hadn’t made an error of editorial judgement. Instead, they had given their viewers what they wanted and expected. Indeed, changing what is taken for granted as the natural order of things would likely spark outrage among the game’s core audience: people who think cricket worth watching is played by men only.

These people aren’t only men and they’re not only found in societies where women are born second-class citizens.

Mignon du Preez recalls bracing for “what was supposed to be a press conference” before leaving for a previous edition of the WWT20 as South Africa’s captain.

“But there was nobody there, just me and Sipokazi [Sokanyile, the team’s media officer]”, Du Preez said.

The problem isn’t confined to places where men make fire and women make salad, as former England medium pacer Isa Guha explained in the Daily Telegraph in March last year: “I remember getting on the team bus to Lord’s on the day of the [2009] WWT20 final, just two months after [England won] the World Cup, when the men had already been knocked out and we were the only hope of lifting a trophy on home soil.

“Despite our recent success, it appeared that the general public were unaware our competition was even taking place. On the way to the match, I saw a pub promoting the men’s game between Pakistan and Sri Lanka. We hadn’t even managed to garner a mention, even as the host nation.”

Eight years later, Lord’s was sold out for the women’s World Cup final. In the Long Room, Marylebone Cricket Club members in their bacon-and-egg ties saw a rousing contest in which England beat India by nine runs. Whether their eyes were good enough to know they were watching women went unasked, perhaps to save the ancient spike-pocked floorboards from being spattered by spluttered pink gin.

Hours afterwards, with founder Thomas Lord himself glowering dark and stormy from a painting on a wall in a vast room named in his honour and England’s celebration in full, bubbly flow, this reporter posed for his one and only starstruck selfie with cricket’s finest bowler, bar none: the magnificent Anya Shrubsole, bender of time, space and the paths of cricket balls, who had taken 6/46.

England had put South Africa out of the running in a heart-stopping semi-final in Bristol, which ended with another wonderful bowler, Marizanne Kapp, on her haunches in the middle of a suddenly desolate field; unable and unwilling to accept the awful truth of defeat and unimpeachable in her right not to do so.

It was cricket at its most watchable and visceral human drama, and the increasing focus on it is “worlds apart” from what Du Preez experienced earlier in her career.

“This time, at the farewell at CSA’s [Cricket South Africa] head office [in Johannesburg on October 23], the amount of media who were there, we were blown away.

“It was really special to see all the people who were there for us. Everybody wants a bit of the something special that we have. We need to say thank you.

“We need the media to help build our brand. That’s what happening and we’re really fortunate. I want to say thank you to everybody for all the support.”

Some of this will sound insipid. But try to imagine Kevin Petersen or David Warner thanking the press for doing their jobs. Or being grateful for support staff.

“It’s amazing to have all the hands on deck,” Du Preez said, and ticked them off like a kid listing what they got for Christmas: “We’ve got a batting specialist! A bowling coach! Someone who does the fielding! A media person at hand! It definitely helps because we can concentrate on specifics, and it’s always good to get a different point of view. We’re very fortunate that CSA have invested in us and given us the resources.”

It’s a shiny new reality for South Africa’s women players, who until three years ago weren’t on CSA’s payroll. That they now are is thanks in no small part to the South African Cricketers’ Association (SACA), the players’ trade union.

Even so, women’s retainers with CSA are worth, on average, a quarter of what men are paid. That must hurt?

“I don’t think we’re bothered that much,” Du Preez said. “The amount of work that CSA and SACA have done to ensure that we get parity benefit has been amazing.

“We’re travelling business class. We’ve got single rooms. We’ve got a provident fund. We’ve got medical aid. All that is the same as the men. When we travel our meal allowance and cellphone allowance are on par.

“We need to be realistic — there’s a lot more men playing the sport and they are bringing in the revenue.”

And it shows, what with women’s cricket routinely piggybacked onto the men’s game in sponsorship deals, and as curtainraisers in front of stands that will fill up only hours later. Indeed, the current WWT20 is the first to be staged as a standalone tournament.

But, according to the Federation of International Cricketers’ Association’s “Women’s Global Employment Report and Survey”, released on October 24, only 120 women worldwide call cricket their profession — or almost three times fewer than the 317 registered professionals, regardless of gender, in South Africa alone.

Matters are improving. Australia’s top women players earned a minimum of Aus$40 000 (just shy of R415 000) at the beginning of the year. Prolonged, at times bitter negotiations saw that leap to Aus$72 076.

But even giants of women’s sport are less equal than men. The 2017 Australian Open women’s tennis final and the women’s and men’s Big Bash League finals coincided. The television audience in Australia for the cricket peaked at 959 000, while 1.2-million tuned in to watch Serena Williams beat her sister Venus.

Advantage women? Maybe not. The cover of the current issue of the US edition of GQ magazine features Serena Williams. If you didn’t know what she does for a living, you wouldn’t have guessed from her long-sleeved leotard, which bared her legs to the hip, neatly framing her crotch, and allowed her cleavage to pop through a peephole.

As if that wasn’t enough to make Williams all about gender and nothing about what she has given the world, GQ billed her as their “Woman” of the Year.

That’s right. In quotes. Says it all.

Congrats, Ms and Ms Van NieKapp. But how will team dynamics be affected?

If the #MeToo movement is ever taken seriously in South Africa, a third of men would be in prison and another third rendered unemployable and shunned. The remaining third would be those clever enough to hide their sexism.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

UNTIL Sunday, Marizanne Kapp’s Wikipedia page made no reference to Dané van Niekerk, whose entry on the same platform did indeed feature her partnership with Kapp.

But only to say she shared a stand of “128 runs with Marizanne Kapp [against Pakistan in a 2013 World Cup match in Cuttack], the highest South African partnership for the sixth wicket”.

A contemporary report on that performance begins: “Marizanne Kapp and Dané van Niekerk have a lot in common. They both are allrounders. They made their international debut during the 2009 Women’s World Cup. And they are ‘best friends’ in the South Africa dressing room. They are also room-mates whenever the team goes on tour.”

On Saturday, the pair removed all the nudges and winks by doing something that, in a better world, would go unreported in a proper publication except, perhaps, on the social pages.

They married each other.

Cue, on Sunday, the addition of a “personal life” section on those Wikipedia pages: “In July 2018, she married her teammate Marizanne Kapp” and “In July 2018, she married her teammate Dané van Niekerk.”

Congratulations, Ms and Ms Van NieKapp.

Last week a Cricket South Africa official spoke, politely but firmly, of an imminent “very private and very small ceremony” — code for, no, you cannot have an interview or send a photographer, or anything else.

“They are strictly anti inviting the media into their personal relationship,” the official said. “There won’t even be social media posts of the wedding. It’s not a secret but they prefer to keep their life together private.”

Damn straight, although there were social media posts: Kapp put three uncaptioned photographs of the wedding on her Instagram account. The brides wore white.

By Monday afternoon the pictures had elicited 2 911 likes and 132 comments — 128 of them giddily offered congratulations. What of the four exceptions?

“WTF,” someone said. Another wanted to know if “this is possible”. Someone else asked “where is the bridegrooms”.

A post in Hindi translated to: “I’m having to see a woman as hot as [Van] Niekerk marrying a woman. My life is over.”

Even though they are public figures, and thus, according to a particular take on these things, not entitled to private lives, exceptions must be made for Kapp and Van Niekerk.

Not because they may want it that way, but because too often sport is a rock that hides terrified creatures that, it seems, have never been held up to the light.

Most of them are straight and male and, intolerably, tolerated in societies that should not be considered civilised for that reason.

This abhorrence thrives in deeply misogynist South Africa. We live in a country we dare to call a democracy, where everyday sexism is dismissed as “our culture” and the evil of corrective rape by men of women who dare to proclaim their independence from the straight and narrow goes unpunished unforgivably often.

If the #MeToo movement is ever taken seriously in South Africa, a third of men would be in prison and another third rendered unemployable and shunned. The remaining third would be those clever enough to hide their sexism. As a South African man, I’m eminently qualified to make that assertion.

But it’s not only the straights who are upset with Kapp and Van Niekerk. A section of the queer community will rail against what they consider two of their own seeking the establishment’s endorsement of their relationship.

They can’t win, can they?

Even objective cricket fans will have questions. Kapp and Van Niekerk aren’t the first members of the same cricket team to be married — in March last year New Zealand’s Amy Satterthwaite and Lea Tahuhu tied the knot — but it would seem to be the first time one of the brides has been that team’s captain.

Does that mean Kapp will get preferential treatment from the skipper, Van Niekerk? What might their conversation over dinner be like if Kapp feels her captain didn’t bowl her in the right match situations? Will team meetings freeze over if Kapp disagrees markedly with Van Niekerk’s proposed tactics, or vice versa? Or doesn’t voice her disagreement? What’s the dressingroom going to be like if one drops a catch off the other?

Will the crockery fly at home if one runs the other out?

All of those questions — except the last one — have been answered: in their nine years as international players Kapp and Van Niekerk have been integral to South Africa’s success.

That includes reaching last year’s World Cup semi-final, where South Africa went down with the kind of fight rarely shown by the men’s team under similar pressure.

They have clearly performed more than well enough to prove that their relationship, which has endured for much of the last nine years, doesn’t have a negative impact on team dynamics.

As for runouts, Van Niekerk and Kapp have between them been dismissed in that fashion 32 times at international level. And not once were they batting together at the time.

The plates, then, are safe. For now …

Leading Edge: Men are ruining a game played with integrity by women

Why can’t men play cricket without resorting to neanderthal conduct?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IF you didn’t know that men — as opposed to women, boys, girls or meerkats — are contesting the test series between South Africa and Australia, you should by now.

“It’s a lot of men playing out there and you’re allowed to celebrate sometimes,” Vernon Philander said during the St George’s Park test. “Sometimes there’s a fine line about celebrating too hard.

“It’s a bunch of men playing this game. It would be a totally different ballgame if it was a bunch of schoolboys. We tend to take things personally.”

Other players have also reached for the M-word in response to questions about the poor standards of player behaviour in the series.

Among them Faf du Plessis, who when asked what all this manliness was about joked, albeit not snidely: “We’re men and we play the game.”

Are these explanations for why men can’t seem to play a game of cricket without resorting to neanderthal conduct?

Or are they excuses — we’re men; we know not what we do?

What they should be is apologies, but they sound much more not sorry than sorry.

There’s a “boys will be boys” dismissiveness about how players from both sides have tried to rationalise the rampant and puerile swearing, shocking misogyny and, in one case, what would in a court of law be called assault the series has had to endure.

Men are not admitting their limitations when they resort to stating their gender in answer to concerns over the way they have, or haven’t, done something. Instead, they are proclaiming their superiority.

We’re men, dammit. That’s why.

There’s something like pride in the fact that, even in 2018 and despite everything that namby-pamby International Cricket Council tries to throw at them, men are still in touch with their primal selves enough to be able to summon their basest behaviour at the flick of an emotional switch.

And no switch is as easily flicked as the mere mention of a woman who is close to them, particularly by an adversary.

Take it from a man, “Your mother sleeps with your father,” would start an all-out brawl if it was uttered on the dressingroom stairs.

This poisonous perversion has permeated the boundary, beyond which lurk pathetic husks of humans wearing Sonny Bill Williams masks and thinking they’re funny.

None of this is, of course, limited to cricket. The world has been messed up by men for centuries, and they have tended to blame women for their failures or at least use them as justification for getting things badly wrong.

Hence, David Warner could not control his anger when his wife was apparently insulted by Quinton de Kock, who had himself been provoked by alleged comments about his wife and mother.

Of course, part of Warner’s defence for behaving as he did was that he was standing up for women.

Those damn women. Always causing problems in men’s lives. Once they were burned at the stake as witches. Now they are torched on social media.

It is not manly to stalk a cricket ground like some caveman sniffing the air for the scent of prey, and to react as if you have been attacked at a mention of what you decide is the wrong thing to say. It is, instead, evidence that evolution hasn’t made much progress.

It is also what does not happen when women play cricket. There is aggression aplenty in women’s cricket — watch Marizanne Kapp bowl and you will be in no doubt about that — and the sledging can be rougher than a goat’s knee. But there is also fine skill and wonderful competitiveness.

Women play cricket. Men don’t so much play cricket as try to punish it for being a game worth playing: how dare cricket think it can put an XI in front of us who think they are better than us?

Men are ruining a game that is played with more integrity by women. There are indeed a lot of men playing out there. Too many.