Women at the Wicket: How Asia's women's cricket teams are rising up through the ranks, breaking barriers and changing the game

Malaysia’s women’s national team had played just one international match before that 2007 tournament, as had Hong Kong, against fellow participant China. The Thai women’s team were also new to the sport and had been given just a few months to prepare—they went on to lose every game in the tournament. The final match saw Bangladesh triumph over Nepal.

“I thought that would probably make them feel a bit dejected, but they wanted to prove themselves,” says Shan Kader, director of cricket at the Cricket Association of Thailand. Most of the team stuck with the game and were supported in their development; in the next edition of the same tournament two years later, Thailand were the runners-up. “They had a lot of belief that they could have a future in the sport.”

Sornnarin Tippoch was one of the first Thai athletes to join the women’s national team and captained it during that first tournament and beyond. Like many of her teammates, she transitioned from another sport, softball, while others came from sepak takraw (kick volleyball), volleyball, basketball and football. Few had any prior knowledge of cricket.

“It started off with confusion and curiosity,” says Tippoch through a translator. At first, she found the rules complicated, but of that first tournament, she says, “I felt I couldn’t give up when I didn’t even understand the game yet. I loved the challenge and felt like this could still develop to be something bigger, which is why I kept playing. And now, I want to see more Thai people playing cricket.” Tippoch retired as a professional cricketer at the end of last year after a 16-year-career but remains involved as a coach and mentor. 

Similar to the Thai team, the UAE side was also freshly formed just before that same 2007 tournament and was comprised mainly of students making their debut and led by 12-year-old Natasha Cherriath. They also lost all their games.

Fast-forward to 2024, and the scene is very different. At this year’s ACC Women’s Premier Cup, which took place in February, the UAE beat Malaysia in the final. Meanwhile, in women’s Twenty20 Internationals (T20I), the shortest version of the game, Thailand has rapidly risen up team rankings of all ICC members, and currently sits in 12th position, the highest-placed Asian nation outside the subcontinent.

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Experiences like Tippoch’s are not unique in women’s cricket. Kary Chan was an all-rounder on the sporting field, playing basketball, football and volleyball, before transitioning to cricket off the back of a promotion day at her school.

“I had no idea [about cricket]. I come from a very traditional Chinese family. In Hong Kong, at first there weren’t many Chinese [people] playing cricket or even knowing about cricket,” says Chan, who now captains the Hong Kong women’s team, but whose parents spent several years telling friends that their daughter played baseball. “But in the last ten years, cricket has become more popular and you have it in schools. There’s more Chinese [people] playing and more interest in cricket.” This is despite space being at a premium and Hong Kong being home to only three cricket grounds, which are shared between the men’s and women’s teams.

Ravi Nagdev started working with Cricket Hong Kong (now Cricket Hong Kong, China) in 1997 when the association was just starting its development programme, going into schools from 1998 to market the sport and spot emerging talent. “We wanted to try and bring cricket to every sector of society,” says Nagdev. “Before 1997, cricket was always seen as a league sport played in [private] clubs. It wasn’t something which an average-income person would be playing. After [the return of Hong Kong to China], we wanted to ensure that cricket was not just a sport played by the elite, but was played by everyone.”

Cricket might be the second-most popular sport in the world by number of fans, with 2.5 billion, the largest proportion of whom are from India, yet at the same time it’s a game linked to the upper classes in England, where it is widely accepted to have originated. A 2023 investigation by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket into English cricket found that racism, sexism and elitism are deep-rooted in the sport. Discrimination and a lack of ethnically diverse representation were also found to be widespread, while the report also stated that “women are not even nearly on an equal footing with men within the sport today. Our evidence shows that women continue to be treated as subordinate to men within, and at all levels of, cricket.”

In post-colonial Hong Kong, the development of the sport by Cricket Hong Kong “started by breaking down the barriers to everyone, whatever your ethnicity or social background”, says Nagdev. “The second barrier was gender. We knew women’s cricket was happening in the big countries, and we saw in other sports—football especially—women’s sport was exploding, for example with the Women’s World Cup in the USA [in 1999].”

In Hong Kong today, half of the women’s squad is ethnically Chinese, in contrast to the men’s national team, which currently has no Chinese players.

Twenty-one-year-old Iqra Sahar is one of a handful of Pakistani girls on the Hong Kong women’s national squad. The Hong Kong-born bowler grew up watching cricket on television with her father and came to love it. However, despite Pakistan having a well-established women’s team, which is currently eighth in the T20I rankings, it was always the men’s teams that she watched. Sahar had the opportunity to play cricket at her secondary school in Hong Kong, trained hard and was picked to play at a club and then for the city. But most of her family wanted her to focus on her studies instead of sport, and to follow in the footsteps of the other women in her family and to become a teacher. Now in her third year of playing for the Hong Kong women’s side, where she’s an opening bowler and last year took a hat trick, bowling out three players successively from the Nepal side in the Hong Kong Women’s T20I Series, her mother and brother (her father passed away in 2018) are big supporters. However, she still faces pushback within her community.

“They judge you: ‘You should be at home; you should be doing the house chores; maybe you should go and do something like teaching; you’re a girl, you shouldn’t be out on the field, it’s not your thing to do’,” says Sahar, of some of the criticism she has faced. Her retort: “If you love cricket, embrace it wholeheartedly and don’t let anything hold you back. Even if people are not supporting you, it’s fine. Just back yourself and do it. Embrace the sport and believe in yourself and let your passion guide you. Remember you have the power to make something different.”

Cricket is becoming increasingly widespread and inclusive in Hong Kong. In 2017, the SCC Divas, Hong Kong’s first cricket team made up of foreign domestic workers, was started by local businessman Animesh Kulkarni and domestic helper Josie Arimas. Many of the team members have since gone on to represent their country in the Philippines women’s national cricket team and in Hong Kong there are now two additional teams of Filipina domestic helpers. Meanwhile, Nagdev’s goal for the city is to establish all-abilities cricket for the deaf and the visually impaired. “Cricket is one of few sports where you can play at these levels. I think it’s one of those sports that’s truly for all and we see the potential,” says Nagdev.

The men’s and women’s Hong Kong teams are currently similarly ranked, with the men’s team at 21 and the women’s at 22. The same is true for the Malaysia national teams, which are both ranked 24th (at time of writing). However, in Thailand, the all-Thai women’s national team outperforms its male counterpart significantly. Not only do they rank 12th compared to the men’s 60th, but the women’s team also boasts One Day International (ODI) status, which it received in 2022 and will hold until 2027, indicating it is one tier above the other associate member teams and that results from one-day games will also count towards its ranking and World Cup qualification.

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Yet the Thai team faces other hurdles.

“It’s difficult to get women to play,” says Kader, citing the many hours spent outdoors under a hot sun compared to sports with shorter matches such as volleyball and football where the Thai women’s national teams are also excelling. He adds that climate change and pollution levels are not helping, nor is the limited awareness of cricket as a sport in Thailand. “I think one of the sad things is that people outside Thailand recognise our players more than people in the country.”

But beyond these challenges, women’s cricket shows great potential.

“In women’s cricket the [skills] gap [between teams] is less. We see more success stories like Thailand,” says Nagdev. “There’s a lot of talent in associate cricket; it’s catching up and [teams are] coming up the rankings more quickly and there are more upsets happening. The catch-up is coming.”

Kader says, “It’s still a very niche market. So [cricket offers] a chance to represent your country more easily, but also the ICC is trying to advocate for gender equality and grow the game in that respect, so if parity becomes clearer in the future, there’s a lot of opportunities not just as players, but as trainers, umpires, referees, broadcasters. There’s a lot of things that cricket does open its doors to, and I think it’s exciting.”

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The number of tournaments, leagues and series for women has been steadily increasing, and such competitions are attracting greater numbers of viewers. The ICC Women’s T20 World Cup 2023, for example, was the most watched ICC women’s event to date, marking an increase of 44 per cent from the previous 2020 Women’s T20 World Cup.

One significant recent addition to the tournament calendar has been Fairbreak, run by an Australian company that promotes gender equality in the sport, and which since 2013 has pioneered tours and events centred on women’s cricket. In 2022, it launched its first invitational tournament in Dubai, followed by a second in Hong Kong in 2023, bringing together some of the best female cricketers from top teams as well as top associate players with a goal of breaking barriers, creating opportunities and inspiring a more equitable future on and off the pitch. Duraisingam and Sahar in particular highlighted the tournament’s significance in their cricketing journeys.

Upcoming tournaments for Asia’s women’s teams include the Women’s Asia Cup. The tournament is dominated by India, which has won every year since the inaugural competition in 2004 bar one where Bangladesh took the title, but Thailand made the semi-finals in 2022 and will return this year alongside Nepal, Malaysia and the UAE. The tournament will take place in Sri Lanka at the end of July and for the second time will feature all-female referees and umpires.

In 2025, the National Games of China will be co-hosted by Hong Kong, and Nagdev is working to make cricket part of the event. “I think we will see an explosion of cricket [in China] in the next few years,” he says, based on what he has already observed in the country. “And I think that [the women’s] team will start jumping up the ranks quicker than the men’s.”

As announced last year, cricket will also be part of the LA 2028 Summer Olympics. While the number of teams will likely be limited (potentially to just six), it is unclear whether eligibility will come from rankings or a qualifying tournament. The latter would provide an opportunity to lower-ranked teams, but based on current T20I rankings, it is unlikely that any of Asia’s associate member teams will get in.

However, Kader has high hopes for the Brisbane 2032 Summer Olympics: “I feel that the pool of teams will be a lot bigger, and if Malaysia or Thailand get in, it’s good representation for a team outside the subcontinent because when you speak about Asia and cricket at the moment, it’s very subcontinental.”

A sport’s place in the Olympics also gives it greater cachet. “In England or Australia, cricket is a big sport, but in Hong Kong it’s not an international sport until it gets into the Olympics, so this is a very good step for us,” says Chan, adding that China will also put more focus on, invest more money in and provide more support to cricket now that it is due to be part of the Games. 

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But even cricket’s place in regional multisport events and the success of teams there has helped to put the sport on the radar of the next generation of girls. Duraisingam says that the South East Asian Games in Malaysia in 2017, at which the Thai women’s team triumphed, encouraged both greater support for and involvement in women’s cricket.

While few of the current generation of national players have female cricketing role models—most cite male players as their inspiration, though Sahar does mention Pakistani bowler Fatima Sana and Duraisingam calls out England captain Heather Knight—they are the ones filling these roles for the next generation, most of whom are growing up with the sport as opposed to transitioning from other sports, thanks in part to the youth development programmes from the likes of Kader and Nagdev.

“Women’s cricket is helping to break boundaries in several ways. It’s producing strong leaders or role models who inspire others to break gender stereotypes and basically just demonstrating that women can excel in traditionally male-dominated fields,” says Sahar, who regularly has girls from her community reaching out as they are keen to play cricket with her or simply learn about her experiences.

“In the end, I believe if you really want to do those things, you can,” says Chan. “Don’t give up, especially in cricket, because we have a lot of support. You don’t need to worry about being alone, because no matter in Hong Kong, or in Asia, or in the world, you can see that women’s cricket is getting bigger. You just need to keep going.”

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