Cricket Witness No 4 - Women at the WIcket

71 ‘Too much emphasis on personal comfort’ sport’s image as a serious endeavour. This would have satisfied the likes of Dar Lyon and the Club Cricket Conference to the extent women were not directly competing with men. In the same vein, the WCA ‘recommended’ no matches were played on Sundays as sport on the Sabbath remained controversial in the eyes of many Christian denominations. 34 Marjorie Pollard frequently repeated the need for decorum and etiquette on the cricket field and play with unwavering respect for the opposition and officials. Those that arrived late, played with poorly maintained equipment or spurned the dress code endangered ‘the struggle it was to get cricket established’ and were castigated as ‘personally inefficient, lazy, thoughtless, inconsiderate and quite incapable of minding themselves.’ Women’s Cricket was filled with articles and editorials, penned by Pollard, instructing players on correct behaviour, both on and off the field. 35 Style of play was also an area where femininity was enhanced. Advocates of women’s cricket, for example the sporting polymath C.B. Fry, emphasised how women’s distinctive ‘gracefulness, balance and quickness. Nimbleness of foot and precision of poise, combined with subtleness’ was evidence cricket suited them. Instead of men’s ‘brute strength’, he argued, women’s unique attributes allowed her to play with ‘skill’ and, as Pollard put it, ‘shun the vulgar clout for the refined straight back-lift’. Their bowling, too, was not only ‘graceful’, it was ‘beautiful’. Other women, like solicitor Wilhelmina Soman, argued women were in fact better suited to the game as they were more patient than men. By highlighting the supposedly natural female qualities of courtesy, delicacy and elegance, cricketers sought to distance themselves from masculine traits closely associated with the game. A woman would simply never dream of unceremoniously heaving a ball through cow-corner. 36 Administrators were aware that to counter their opponents they needed to demonstrate a high level of reverence for the national game. Pollard was all too conscious that, unlike netball, and to a lesser degree hockey and lacrosse, cricket was an established male space that ‘did not belong’ to women and ‘decency and respect’ were fundamental to wider acceptance. This is one reason the fundamental laws of cricket were not altered to limit strenuousness. Unlike tennis or golf, where the duration of the game, length of hole or handicap was usually altered, or lacrosse where bodily contact was prohibited, cricket’s organising bodies were not willing to manipulate the game, for example by reducing the number of balls bowled in an over. This may have been interpreted as blasphemous by a sport with a quasi-religious following. 37 Certainly, a level of obsequiousness was evident in the language used by female players. Pollard described the likes of W.G. Grace, Don Bradman and Kumar Ranjitsinhji as ‘deities’ and their playing fields as ‘hallowed turf’. Such admiration was both sincere and necessary: the strength of women’s cricket heavily relied upon the support of sympathetic men. The clubs affiliated to the English Women’s Cricket Federation were almost wholly extensions of existing male cricket clubs, with shared grounds and facilities. Although this situation was less common in the WCA, who tended