The Haves and the Have-Nots

Sport is all about the contest.

Professional sport is all about making the contest entertaining and absorbing to watch, so that people are willing to pay to be entertained.

Last night's game between England and the West Indies was neither entertaining nor absorbing, and indeed it was no contest whatsoever. As I got back on my train home from Hove I heard one man who had been at the game say to his friend "It was a good win, but it would have been nice if the West Indies had shown up".

Will I be making the trek to any more of the West Indies' games in this series? The answer is "No". That is not through lack of effort. I have already watched nine live games of county cricket this season having driven hundreds of miles to Taunton, Southport and Beckenham amongst other places. The vital factor is that each of those games has been more entertaining than last night's international.

The reason is that the West Indies only have one class cricketer in their midst - Hayley Matthews. She cannot do it all on her own, although she tried in the first game of the series. I am afraid to say that very few of the others in the Windies team, if any, would even make it into any of the Tier One county teams that I have watched this year. 

This is not the fault of the players, or indeed of Cricket West Indies. It is a fault of the structure of women's cricket (and indeed cricket in general it seems), whereby the strong are getting stronger and more powerful and richer, and the weak are becoming weaker, poorer and more irrelevant. The powerful are India, Australia and England. The weak are all the rest. 

It is no surprise that it is those three countries that have the only three stand-alone short form tournaments where players can make substantial amounts of money. And the majority of the players that make those substantial amounts, and play in the majority of the games, are from those same three countries. It is a never-ending and vicious circle. 

Somehow the powers that be have to redress the balance. More resources need to be channelled to the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the rest. If not then we can look forward to more games like last night at Hove, and the chances of making women's cricket a self-sustaining sport, that the public are willing to pay a realistic amount of money to watch, are practically zero. 

Martin Davies
24/V/2025