History was made at Lord’s today, as the first-ever women’s Test began on the hallowed turf. While a significant moment for equality, it highlights the absurd length of time it’s taken for the game’s grandest venue to welcome women into the fold, writes Katya Witney.
The iconic five minute bell was rung by the equally iconic Enid Bakewell before the start of play on day one at Lord’s. Bakewell, now 85 years old, is one of England’s greatest players. She represented England 35 times between 1968 and 1982, and is one of five players ever to score a century and take 10 wickets in the same Test (Ian Botham, Imran Khan, Shakib Al Hasan and Betty Wilson are the others). She also scored a century in the first-ever cricket World Cup final, as well as scoring a hundred on Test debut.
However, while Bakewell’s career saw her set and break multiple records, only once did it see her play at Lord’s. She played in the first-ever game England Women were permitted to play at Lord’s in 1976 – a 60-over game against Australia, which England won comfortably, in part thanks to a Bakewell half-century.
England had been allowed to play a match at Lord’s that year largely because of the success of the 1973 World Cup. The MCC said at the time that England Women had “earned the right” to play at the historic venue, signalling a change to their previous stance, which had been outwardly hostile to the idea of women playing at Lord’s.
Originally, there was a suggestion that they could play a Test match at Lord’s in 1976, but scheduling proved impossible – it would require moving or forgoing some of the men’s games played there. While a 60-over game was eventually agreed, it was subject to whether Middlesex qualified for a home quarter-final in the Gillette Cup, which would take priority over the England-Australia game if they did. They didn’t qualify, and history was made.
It’s taken 50 years since the MCC first floated the idea for Lord’s to host a women’s Test match. In that time, the likes of Trent Bridge, Headingley, Edgbaston, Old Trafford and The Oval have all hosted at least one women’s Test. So glaring was the omission of Lord’s from that list that, in 2023, the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket declared that “the Home of Cricket is still principally for men” and labelled it “truly appalling” that Lord’s had never hosted a women’s Test.
The historic attitude towards hosting women’s cricket at Lord’s by the MCC has largely been at odds with other venues. Women were playing cricket five miles south at The Oval in 1934. Yet it took until 1999, when current England coach Charlotte Edwards was already three years into her international career, for the MCC to allow women to become members. Earlier this year it was reported that the MCC are considering fast-tracking female membership applications in order to address the gender imbalance in the club – women make up 3.2 per cent of the MCC’s 18,000 members.
Almost half a century after declining to host the first-ever World Cup final, Lord’s bore witness to the final of the 2017 edition. That match will always be a landmark moment for the women’s game, as fans packed out the ground and millions watched around the world. Since then, Lord’s has slowly increased the number of women’s international matches it’s hosted – including a record-breaking ODI attendance in 2022, as well as the T20 World Cup final this year. However, considering England men will play two Test matches at Lord’s this summer, that only two women’s ODIs have been hosted there since the World Cup final in 2017 shows how slow this growth has been.
Nevertheless, the players walking through the Long Room in whites – a room they have historically been barred from – on their way out to the middle is a symbolically important moment. It’s only four days since the T20 World Cup final played out on the same turf. For this fortnight, the Home of Cricket has been principally for women.
There’s a risk, though, that this could be a significant moment in isolation. The Test at Lord’s is the first women’s Test to be played in England for three years, and appetite from women’s Test cricket among those with the power to arrange it has been low, despite gestures of goodwill.
In 2022, outgoing ICC Chair Greg Barclay said that women’s Tests won’t be “part of the landscape moving forward to any real extent”. When the ECB offered to host a Test match during the White Ferns’ tour last year, they were turned down by New Zealand Cricket, reportedly because of their unwillingness to host a reciprocal fixture. When the Women’s International Future Tours schedule was released up until 2029, it included Test matches for the first time in more than two decades. But these fixtures remain sparse one-offs, without context, and even those that do get put in the calendar are no certainty to go ahead. Earlier this year, one of those Tests due to take place between West Indies and Australia was cancelled at short notice. There seems little hope that the Test England are due to play in the Caribbean next year won’t meet the same fate.
There’s a temptation, when glass ceilings are broken, to move on and leave the images of shattered glass as proof of progress made in the past tense. In reality, that progress remains capped until all of the shards have been swept away. That only happens when the next women’s Test is played at Lord’s, and the next, and the next, and the next. For that to happen, all of the existing tensions in why there are so few women’s Test in the first place – money, professionalism, lack of red-ball domestic cricket, scheduling – have to be answered. If those questions aren’t answered, the first women’s Test match at Lord’s risks becoming its last.
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