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

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.