 "WPL, Mumbai Indians")
Insofar as official tournament hashtags go, the Women’s Premier League (WPL) seemed to have nailed it perfectly. #YehToBasShuruatHai (this is just the beginning) works two-fold — the promise of more to keep everyone excited and the thrill at having already broken a ceiling, but wait, there’s more yet. For a country obsessed with cricket — although most of India’s obsession is with the boys in blue — this tournament’s epic finale, won by the Mumbai Indians at Brabourne Stadium on Sunday, may well be the catalyst to change the future of the women’s game.
Official attendances in the league have gone up to 30,000, and average attendance ranged from 9,000 to 13,000 for most games at the two venues staging the tournament — the Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai and the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. If this was surprising, it was also vindication for the Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI’s) decision to allow free entry to female spectators, a move aimed at boosting the number of attendees and developing a broader audience for the women’s game in the country.
It has also proved that there remains an audience for women’s sport, provided those in charge of sport market it in the way it deserves. “It’s really a chicken and egg situation,” UP Warriorz captain Alyssa Healy says. “To see women’s cricket grow, you have to invest in it. You have to put it on TV, inside stadiums, make sure there are games for people to watch. Once people do that, you’ll reap the dividends.”
Healy is speaking from experience. The vice-captain of the Australian women’s team has been among the stalwarts of women’s cricket over the past decade and has seen the game flourish in her own country. In 2016, Healy was among a select and privileged few who were part of the inaugural Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) in Australia. Modelled on the Indian Premier League (IPL), the WBBL was the first of its kind franchise-based competition for women cricketers anywhere in the world. Healy’s team, the Sydney Sixers, were runners-up that year. The league is now at the top for the women’s franchise cricket calendar with many Indian players also jostling to play in it.
“Well, it's completely different now,” Healy says, comparing the inaugural seasons of two path-breaking leagues across two continents. “At that time, most women cricketers were semi-professional, there wasn’t so much money in the game, and in many ways, the quality of the game itself was much lower.”
These, succinctly put, have been among the many draws of the WPL. Foreign players have been signing up to play the league not just for the access to quality high-grade competitive action but also for the money that could set them up for the future.
Gujarat Giants’ all-rounder Ashleigh Gardner put her name in the auction because she wanted to get familiar with playing in alien conditions in India. “You have to test yourself against the best, and in the most unfamiliar conditions to really improve your own game,” she says. “Of course, it’s not some big secret that the money itself could set me up for life.”
Gardner, who was the WBBL player of the season last time out, coincidentally was the first Australian signed at the auction – for a whopping Rs 3.2 crore. She was part of a furious bidding war between Mumbai, UP and Gujarat, the latter snapping her up with a bid that was a huge improvement to her base price of Rs 50 lakh.
Gardner is far from the only one to have underestimated the success, the brand value and the excitement of the league.
Data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) suggests that the league had garnered a cumulative reach of 50.78 million in eight games in its opening week. The league was broadcast on Viacom18, and was free for streaming on JioCinema, the same platform that broadcast the 2020 FIFA World Cup.
According to JioCinema’s publicly released data, the World Cup saw over 125 million viewers on the platform during the tournament. The WPL — also courtesy of being a cricket-based commodity — is predicted to have far surpassed those numbers.
While viewership remained high, many observers say that it may take Viacom18 a few years to recover the cost of the media rights (Rs 200 crore). Ad slots for the tournament were a fraction (rumoured to be Rs 60,000-70,000 for 10 seconds) of the men’s IPL (which range from Rs 18-19 lakh for 10 seconds). Tata Motors, Hero Vida, MPL Striker, World Gold Council, H&M and JSW Paints were among the many key sponsors of the league.
The game plan, from the broadcaster as well as BCCI, seems to be to use and create an independent brand around women cricketers themselves. This was most visible in the way that many of the said ad slots featured women cricketers from different franchises, country no bar.
Harleen Deol, one of younger stars of the Indian women’s team, who was part of the Gujarat Giants franchise, sees this as the precursor to more in the future. “For many of the girls, this was an eye-opening experience,” she says. “Being around national team players and international players was a unique experience. We often don’t get to spend time with cricketers from other countries.”
If there has been one small red mark against the inaugural edition, it was the performances of domestic players over the course of the tournament. Only two Indians (Harmanpreet Kaur and Shafali Verma) feature in the top 10 run-getters in the tournament. Three of them (Saika Ishaque, Shikha Pandey and Deepti Sharma) feature in the top 10 wicket-takers. Of these five though, only Ishaque is uncapped for India — a fact that perhaps hints at how small the pool of talent is.
Healy believes that all this will take time, once the league itself settles down. “We had a fair few young Indian players in our squad,” she says. “For us it was important to not just thrust them into the spotlight. It’s good for them to sit back, learn and take it all in.” This is just the start, after all.
