cstriking rooms may also be lonely puts. When Isa Guha began taking part in cricket she was once the one woman in an all-boys group and when she was once just a little older, the one woman in an all-women’s one. Numerous the ladies she performed with and in opposition to in her 10 years of world cricket had equivalent tales, so do numerous the ladies she watches and talks about now, a decade later, in her 2nd occupation as a presenter and commentator.
“Being the only girl in a team, that’s still quite common,” Guha says. “It probably helped my cricket, because I was spending so much time out of my comfort zone, but it still came with the same feelings of isolation.”
Last 12 months, Guha introduced a non-profit mentoring organisation, Take Her Lead, operating in females’s cricket. Before the release, they commissioned a survey of 300 younger feminine cricketers about their reviews. “I know we all feel we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on, but there’s nothing like speaking to people who are coming into the game,” Guha says, “and we were shocked that the experiences they were talking about were the same experiences our mentors had had when they were growing up. It made me realize the sport hasn’t moved forward as much as we think it has.”
They told stories about being uncomfortable wearing whites, because of their periods, but feeling unable to talk to any of their teammates and coaches about it. They spoke, too, about the sense they needed to be twice as good as the boys they were playing with, to prove they deserved their place, and the sense of isolation, of having no one to talk to about it all, because there are so few female coaches.
“There were times when I was 12 or 13 when I wanted to quit the game because I felt so isolated,” Guha says. In her case, that loneliness was once exacerbated as a result of there have been so few British Asian ladies taking part in the sport.
That is still the case. Guha was the first woman with a British South Asian background to play for England and 12 years after her retirement she is the only woman with a British South Asian background to have played for England.
“The figure we keep hearing is 30% of the playing population in England is from a South Asian background, but you have to separate men’s and women’s cricket,” she says. The research done by Take Her Lead is designed to help fix that. “The figure is much smaller on the women’s side,” she says, and the upshot is that “five players from minority backgrounds have played for England women, so you have to ask ‘Why?’”
Guha has been doing numerous enthusiastic about that. “In the last few years I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on why I was able to succeed when there was such a lack of representation at the England level,” she says. “Asking myself why I was able to get through the system and I realized it was because of the support I had, especially from my mother. It wasn’t just her, but she gave me the confidence and the belief to be able to do what I did.”
Take Her Lead is, in part, a tribute to her mother, Roma, who died in 2019, and an effort to provide the same kind of support she gave her children to girls who don’t have it in their own lives already. Their first initiative, Got Your Backlaunched on Tuesday.
“I heard those young girls’ experiences and thought: ‘Yeah, I definitely felt that when I was younger, but was I supported to come through it?’ Well, maybe those girls aren’t getting that and that’s why we’re losing them from the game. Got Your Back is meant to raise awareness and understanding about what everyone in the game can do to be better at encouraging women and girls to get involved.”
Beyond that, Take Her Lead is making plans larger initiatives, in collaboration with Ebony Rainford-Brent’s ACE program and the MCC Foundation.
These are atypical occasions for ladies’s cricket. The recreation is converting rapid. Guha has simply been in South Africa, operating at the females’s T20 World Cup. “Last time I was here, when we were on tour in 2011, we would have a hundred people turning up to the ground to watch.” Twelve years later, nearly 13,000 got here to observe the general. “To see a packed house, and all the support for the team from the local community, filled me with so much pride. It was very emotional.
The first Women’s Premier League begins on Saturday. It wasn’t so long ago that England women players had to pay for their own kit – now the best of them are picking up six-figure contracts in the franchise leagues. The pace of change creates its own stresses, as boards try to navigate the new landscape of the game and players reckon with the life-changing sums of money on offer, along with the increased scrutiny that comes with all the exposure.
“We absolutely see a need to manage that transition,” says Guha. The recreation is being stretched, and he or she provides: “We’re really conscious there doesn’t become too much of a gap to entry level.”
At the similar time, the record performed via the Independent Commission into Equity in Cricket is looming over the English recreation. Guha believes it will “uncover a lot of hard truths”, however she additionally sees it as a possibility to make the sport higher, and larger. “You can only move forwards if you know where you’re coming from.”