From Press Box to Reel: The Changing Shape of Misogyny in Cricket Journalism

There was a particular kind of silence in the Wankhede press box that evening. India and England were playing a one-day international, England won by five runs, and Andrew Flintoff ran across the outfield twirling his shirt. It is the same image Sourav Ganguly answered at Lord's with his own shirt-waving celebration. The young journalist sitting in that box was one of only two women in the entire media contingent. The detail is hers, published recently in a major British newspaper.

In my early days I learned that the real story of a match never sits on the scoreboard. It sits in the silence of the box. Twenty-four years later, that same journalist is still covering the same sport, but there is no longer anywhere to go back to. A match used to end and the noise used to stop. Now a match ends and the noise begins inside her phone.

Context

Her career runs as long as modern Indian cricket media itself. The 2026 World Cup, the 2026-08 Australia tour remembered as Monkeygate, the 2026 T20 World Cup, the 2026 World Cup. Interviews with Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne and Brian Lara. A stint as cricket editor at NDTV 24x7. A return to the game through the digital show The Scoop. Anyone with that record is not new to this profession; she is a witness to the era when cricket coverage passed through the doors of print and television, and those doors opened for very few people.

Her argument has to be read against that backdrop. In 2026 she wrote about IPL cheerleading and the male gaze in broadcast, and the reaction was sharp: accusations of jealousy, of feminism. Disagreement was not the new part. The new part was how quickly disagreement translated into an attack on the person. When she returned to broadcasting a decade later, the stage had changed. Instagram and TikTok became part of cricket coverage, short clips were carved out of long shows, and impressions began deciding which sentences got air. The reader's opinion did not shift over ten years; the pipeline carrying that opinion did.

The real question is not whether people write ugly things online. It is what cricket media now rewards.

Core

Cutting a three-minute clip out of a long analytical show is standard production practice. The logic is clean: the clip brings the audience, the audience finds the long show. The arithmetic is simple; the outcome is inverted. When two and a half hours of argument are reduced to the thirty seconds carrying the sharpest opinion, the viewer receives a statement, not a case. And statements are answered with spectacle, not reasoning. I turned the volume down and finally heard the game — a habit I built in the television years. In digital cricket the opposite is happening: the screen is on, and the context is muted.

Within that environment, the attacks on women journalists are three separate things, and collapsing them into one is a mistake. First, professional isolation: two women in the contingent, and the constant weight of comparison with a male predecessor. Second, ideological disagreement: sharp reaction to writing on cheerleading, racism and politics. Third, and the most dangerous, online abuse, which includes gendered insults, sexualised comments, racist language, political accusations and, in one documented instance, an explicit threat of physical violence. The difference is that the first wears you down slowly, the second asks for a debate, and the third simply strikes.

Take one concrete case. Sunil Gavaskar made remarks about Indian-owned Hundred franchises buying Pakistani players, and she challenged them publicly. The volume of abuse that followed is recorded in her account. The selection of Pakistan's spinner Abrar Ahmed by Sunrisers Leeds sits in the background of that argument — a recruitment decision that turned into a debate about national identity. For someone like me, raised in Pakistan and working in India, this matters: I know the two sides of that argument speak different grammars. A journalist abused from both sides does not get to choose a language.

One thread gets less attention at home. The same piece questions IPL cheerleading — a roster drawn largely from foreign, fair-skinned performers, and the beauty politics attached to it. For comparison the writer cites the NFL, where eight of 32 teams have reportedly dropped cheerleaders; that figure comes from her account and I have not verified it independently. When a player is recognised by the print on a shirt rather than by a trophy, how much room for dignity is left for the woman standing outside the rope?

Contrarian

The convenient story is that social media created the hatred. The truth is older. Nobody heard shouting inside the press box, but that never meant the room was kind. In the old order, rudeness was inaudible because so few women were present — two, three, sometimes one. What is kept outside never needs a crowd to be insulted. The digital era did not invent the habit of discrimination; it gave the old silence a voice.

The second comfortable myth is that the internet democratised cricket debate. Half true. Voices that once had no platform now have one. The same door, though, lets the attacks in. And here is the industry's blind spot: online abuse is still filed as a human-resources matter when it is actually a content-supply-chain matter. Abuse generates engagement, engagement is currency, and currency is what platforms and publishers both measure. No machine shuts down the thing that lifts its own graph. In cricket we write four pages on an umpire's tally, and never count the contributors who quietly left digital shows. That number is the real story. Every scorecard is a diary someone forgot to hide, and the hidden page here is the one where nobody gets a headline for quitting.

Takeaway

This argument will not end soon, because its fuel is money and attention, and neither supply is thinning. The decision still rests with the people who sit in production meetings: which clip gets cut, which headline gets its tone, whose voice gets invited onto the panel. Those are the small daily choices that decide whether the person covering the game is safe or a target. Zero shortcuts — that is the ledger I entered this trade with. In this trade the same ledger has a second version: zero shortcuts, zero guarantees. If publishers do not spend the next two seasons treating the abuse accumulating on their own screens with the seriousness they reserve for page views, the women's voices we are only now learning to hear will be the first to disappear.