Running Hard, Standing Still

GH on women's Test cricket

It was raining this week as Et Al passed the storied football oval on North Melbourne’s Arden Street. This was fitting, as it was also raining thirty years when Australia hosted a women’s Test match against England, and play ended in the eighth over. You didn’t know? There’s no real reason to unless you have chosen women’s Test cricket as your special subject on Mastermind. And that’s kind of a problem.

The day-night Test match that begins tomorrow between the women’s teams of Australia and India at the WACA is the hundred and fifty-second spread across more than ninety years. Ninety-three have been drawn. One has hopes for Perth: the teams are well-matched, have a budding shared history and skilful players. But otherwise it’s a thin story. There is no women’s Test Championship; nor are there rankings. The Australian women’s team has built an astonishing cabinet of global trophies in the last two decades - had the Matildas enjoyed such success, no local sporting team would match them. But where Australians take a certain pride in regarding their cricket culture as red-blooded and red-balled, the female quadrant of this is at best pale pink.