The Invisible Labour of Women's Cricket: The History Asia's Fields Never Recorded

On that evening at Lord's, India fell nine runs short. July 2026, the ICC Women's World Cup final. Sitting in a small Bangalore radio studio, I was not merely watching the scorecard — I was counting how many listeners called in wanting, for the first time in their lives, to hear women's cricket discussed in depth. There were 214 calls that night. One elderly woman asked only: "Madam, they bowled just like the men, so where were they all this time?" That question reshaped my journalism.

I am 69 now. I have watched, read, and listened to cricket for 53 years. One thing keeps surfacing — the history of women's cricket in Asia has effectively never been written. What exists is a footnote to the men's game. Scorecards hold runs and wickets, but not who trained through what hardship, whose family said no, who played without pay. I keep one ear on the final score and one ear on who never got heard.

The central question here is this — how does the invisible labour structure within Asian women's cricket pull the game's development in the wrong direction? Transfer markets, contracts, franchises: these dominate the conversation. Outside it sit the players from Nepal's hill grounds to Sri Lanka's coastal villages who have no agent and no ticket to a trial camp.

The largest structural inequity in Asian women's cricket is that the women's share of board budgets appears nowhere in central contracts. Across India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, board annual reports from 2026 show investment in women's cricket running four to twelve times lower than in men's. There is no transfer market here, no league — yet the inequality runs deeper. Because money here is not only money — it is land ownership, stadium scheduling, coaching appointments, the number of physiotherapists, the food budget.

In 2026 I attended a domestic tournament in Bangladesh. A small ground outside Dhaka. The players pulled the nets themselves, set the stumps themselves. After the match a coach told me, "Don't come here, sir, there's no story here." And yet that was exactly where a fundamental difference in two Indian bowlers' run-up mechanics was visible — one relied on the umpire's knee more than his own waist as he loaded, and by the final ten overs his pace dropped. Nobody recorded it. Because no analyst was there.

When India lost the 2026 final, one thing escaped every notice — the collapse in run rate over the last ten overs was not only pressure, it was physiological fade. My kinesiology training lets me spot it, because after 35 overs of bowling, glenohumeral stability cannot hold the same motion pattern. Television panels discussed "mental pressure." Had muscular fatigue been measured rather than psychologised, the outcome might have differed. This is where journalism and coaching-staff interviews diverge.

One aspect of this invisible labour is my contact with the previous generation. Shantha Rangaswamy, who laid the foundation of Indian women's cricket in the 1970s without contracts, without coverage, without insurance. I want to ask her: in today's franchise era, where an emerging bowler earns five lakh rupees a match, has her due been settled? The answer is unclear. Because nobody has done the accounting.

I recall the 2026 Russia World Cup. I was invited onto a television panel. Sitting there, I realised I was being slotted in a particular way — "you're the women's sports specialist." Yet what I wanted to convey was that the attacking patterns women played at Euro 2026 were the same mechanisms France used to score from set pieces in 2026 — counter-attack preparation, second-ball recovery positioning, the inverted winger's role outside the penalty area on corners. I explained it in a 12-part series of my own, with interviews of two Indian women coaches. 1.2 million views. More than the television panel.

Here is another anchor — the 2026 lockdown. In January, Bala Devi signed for Rangers Women, the first Indian woman to play professional football in Europe. Then the pandemic hit. Over 41 days I produced a seven-episode audio diary with her remotely from Manipur. On a 12x12 metre terrace, Bala took 200 touches daily. I tracked 23 Indian women footballers whose seasons were cancelled — no contracts, no addresses.

One dimension of this labour economy must be read alongside the transfer market. In Asian women's cricket, those who have seen a contract document remain a minority. The rest wait for central contracts while camp stipends vanish into train tickets. A proposal of mine, long-standing: 40% of board central contracts should be mandatorily allocated to women's cricket. Not just announcements — audited budgets. Published. That is part of media transparency.

Women have suffered injustice — that phrasing is not mine. I say instead: where infrastructure is absent, talent develops along different paths. Sri Lanka's women beat West Indies in T20 in 2026, and the match-ups show three left-arm bowlers held for the slog overs, generating reverse swing by loading the ball's copper wire. Men's cricket did not have that detail then. Yet no documentary exists. Because streaming platforms do not pay immediately.

The largest structural confusion — Asian women's cricket has advanced consumer expansion ahead of producer expansion. Which is to say, it shows the match world to the world but not the infrastructure. The greatest investment need in Asian women's cricket is in practice facilities, in girls' coaching sessions within grassroots boys' programmes, and at school level. That investment does not arrive immediately. Because television ratings do not arrive immediately.

Change is coming, though. One thing I see clearly — regional league expansion is accelerating. Women's T20 events are multiplying in Nepal, the UAE, Malaysia. Online streaming delivers match coverage at low cost; where I ran listener dialogue on radio in 2026, video makes it easier today. Journalism's form is slowly shifting. That is good.

But one question remains — who will be the partners in this change? If a franchise invests in Asian women's cricket, who owns that contract? The player herself, her family, or the board? The answer is highly pertinent in today's transfer window. Because if anyone scouts an Asian woman player right now, they should know — there is no data, no reports, only match video. No trials. No agents.

I believe a journalist's work is not only reporting. Some writing should stand later as evidence. In 2026 I wrote about Soumya Sarkar, then a rising star. I want future researchers to be able to say, "According to Towhid Mondal..." — so that a citation always exists.

The stories of Bengali women's cricket that go unwritten — I have heard them myself. Where the men's national championship competes, village girls do not arrive, because there is no travel budget. No board announcement solves this. Corporate sponsorship does, and it demands a long-term view of women's sport. I am for that view.

In closing — Asian women's cricket is not merely competition. It is a map of migration, memory, deprivation, and resurgence. That map has no boundary. As the transfer market grows, the voices outside this map will drift further away — unless we listen separately. If we do not listen today, we will not hear tomorrow.

(The final 600 words of the World Cup final script were written from a Bangalore radio cabin, temperature 32 degrees, one fan running in the room. That is how I work.)

The final question — no answer, still today.