The 2025 Women’s World Cup could be India’s biggest cricketing moment in over 50 years

In 1997, a young Jhulan Goswami made her way to the Eden Gardens cricket ground in Calcutta as a ball girl for the World Cup final between Australia and New Zealand. Watching from the boundary, she was captivated by the intensity of the game. She was particularly taken with the Australian medium-pacer Cathryn Fitzpatrick, whose deliveries left a searing mark on the teenager’s mind and eventually pushed her to take up fast bowling at one of Calcutta’s many cricket academies.

India might not have won that World Cup, but the tournament inspired someone who would go on to be described as “the fastest bowler in women’s cricket.” Playing for India, Goswami would also go on to take more wickets than anyone else in women’s One Day International (ODI) cricket. Countless girls like her would have watched the 1997 tournament in stadiums and on television, then gone to sports shops to buy (often their first) cricket bats and balls. Dozens like her would have harangued their parents to let them play cricket with the boys. And so, a new generation of women cricketers was born, inspired by watching other women play serious, competitive cricket for all the world to see.

Read any personal account of a Southasian cricketer’s life and you will find that their earliest and fondest cricket memories often come from playing in the streets. The Indian offspinner R Ashwin, in his memoir I Have the Streets: A Kutti Cricket Story, describes his relationship with street cricket, which he continued to play even after making it to the big leagues and national selection. 

This kind of free, untempered relationship with the “outside” world doesn’t exist for most women who play cricket, especially in Southasia. You will be hard-pressed to find a girls’ cricket game in streets, local parks and maidans across the region, even as boys’ games abound. Confined to sports academies and chaperoned by worried parents, young girls must contend with being coached into the game rather than playing it in the gullies and backyards of their hometowns. 

With the 2025 ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup now underway, hosted jointly by Sri Lanka and India, that could start to change. Sri Lanka is hosting a women’s World Cup for the first time. There and in India, the tournament promises to bring more attention to women’s cricket than ever before (as also, potentially, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, especially if their respective teams do well). Perhaps most significant, however, is that India, as one of the favourites, have a chance to lift a World Cup trophy on home soil. Once before, in 1983, a World Cup win transformed cricket’s fortunes in the country that is now its main home. That moment belonged to the Indian men’s team, and opened the game up to millions more Indian boys. India’s women’s team is overdue a similar pinnacle. If it comes now, finally, the male grip on cricket and the cricketing streets might be pried away. 

WHEN KAPIL DEV led the men’s team to an unexpected victory at the 1983 World Cup in England, it forever altered the way Indians watched cricket. Overnight, cricket replaced hockey as the de facto national sport, making India the cricket-obsessed country it is today. 

“India never expected to become world champions because prior to ’83 India wasn’t a very good one-day side,” the veteran cricket journalist Pradeep Magazine recalled. “But India had a captain in Kapil Dev who, because of his all-round skills, had seeped into popular imagination.” With the win, the resulting explosion in cricket’s popularity, and the money that then started to pour in, the game was forever changed in India. Now, “given the popularity and quality of the women’s team, a World Cup win could do the same for women’s cricket.”

So far, a cricket World Cup has remained just out of grasp of the Indian women’s team. Thrice they have reached a World Cup final – in 2005, 2017 and 2020, across both the ODI and the Twenty20 formats of the game – and lost every time. This year, they have a golden chance to put this right. The current team, led by Harmanpreet Kaur, are no underdogs. On the back of wins against Ireland and England, the Indian team seems to be on a roll, boasting a fierce and ambitious crew of players. From Smriti Mandhana and Kaur herself to Pratika Rawal and Jemimah Rodrigues, the top order features numerous exceptional batters. Add this to first-rate bowlers such as Arundhati Reddy and Renuka Singh, and the team is a formidable competitor. 

In the tournament’s opening match, India beat Sri Lanka before 23,000 spectators in Guwahati. Sterner tests lie ahead: Australia, the outright favourites, and strong teams from South Africa and England could all come in the way of India taking the trophy.  

If Kaur’s team gets to the final on 2 November and wins, it will be the culmination of a long historical journey. The Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI) became a member of the International Women’s Cricket Council in 1973. With that, Indian women’s cricket, which until then had been played sporadically, began to take more formal shape. The Indian team’s first Test match win, against the West Indies, came in 1976. The WCAI only received government recognition in 1978, the year India hosted the Women’s Cricket Cup. 

Indian players began to distinguish themselves. In 1977, against New Zealand, Shantha Rangaswamy became the first Indian woman to score an international century. Sandhya Agarwal scored what was then a world-record 190 runs in a Test match in England in 1986. Fans started paying greater attention too: when India hosted the World Cup for a second time, in 1997, the final between Australia and New Zealand was watched by around 80,000 spectators. 

But it was the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) that was most instrumental in creating opportunities for the women’s team to succeed, primarily by expanding investment in and infrastructure for the women’s game. As a result of an International Cricket Council (ICC) ruling mandating that men’s and women’s cricket boards be the same, Indian women’s cricket was brought under the BCCI’s control in 2006. Women players started to be offered annual contracts in 2015. With better conditions, the Indian team started to perform better. 

In 2017, on the back of a dream performance, the Indian team lost to England in the Women’s World Cup final by a mere nine runs. In the semifinal against Australia, Kaur shone with a blistering 171 runs, which catapulted her to national stardom. Despite the loss in the final, 2017 became the year that women’s cricket really became visible to a lot of the Indian cricket fanbase. Overnight, the Mithali Raj-led team became household names.   

At the 2020 T20 World Cup, India again made it to the final, losing to Australia by 85 runs. In 2022, the BCCI finally started offering the women’s team the same match fees as their male counterparts. Even then, there remained large disparities in the annual retainers offered to men and women players – a Grade A men’s cricketer could expect to earn over INR 50 million, or roughly USD 635,000, while a Grade A women’s cricketer earned INR 5 million at the time (around USD 63,500) – not to mention the gulf in earnings from commercial sponsorships. 

Still, the infrastructure and facilities available to the women’s team have improved drastically after 2017. And a victory in the World Cup, with the national attention and prestige it would garner, could improve infrastructure and commercial opportunities for women cricketers even more – and, at the same time, help erase the wider social stigma associated with women in all sports. Eleven women lifting the cup could uplift an entire generation of sportswomen. 

“Participation will definitely see an upswing when people can see the team’s success,” Suprita Das, a sportswriter and author of the book Free Hit: The Story of Women’s Cricket in India, said. “Girls will be able to believe and convince their families to let them pursue cricket as a career and not be pushed back into academics or employment. Success will trickle down to the domestic level and there will just be more league and domestic games being played.”