LISA STHALEKAR: WBBL behind The Hundred and WPL as Matildas and AFLW draw bigger crowds

As a lover of sport, especially women’s sport, last weekend I was in heaven.

Yet a part of me is disappointed and frustrated that my game, cricket, is the poorer cousin of the other two — AFLW and football.

Fans are voting with their feet and cricket is losing the battle.

Last Saturday, in front of a packed crowd of 12,122 the Kangaroos beat the Brisbane Lions by 30 points. In doing so, they became the first team (men’s or women’s) to win a premiership after an undefeated season.

The success of the match had pundits calling for next year’s AFLW decider to be played at a larger stadium like Marvel to draw up to 25,000 spectators.

Cricket Australia staged its finale at the MCG on Sunday and, beset by bad weather, could only muster 5844 spectators.

The small crowd didn’t dampen the Renegades’ celebrations but a near empty stadium was not a great look.

The Matildas, playing in a friendly against a second-string Brazil side on the Gold Coast later that night, got more than both the cricket and AFLW grand finals combined as 25,297 people watched them lose 2-1.

It was their 16th sold-out home game.

Since the Football World Cup in 2023, the Matildas have captivated the imagination of the Australian public.

It was only four years ago women’s cricket enjoyed such support when 86,174 flocked to the MCG to watch Australia beat India in the Women’s T20 World Cup final in 2020.

So, what has happened?

Some would say that COVID slammed the brakes on any momentum women’s cricket had gained.

However, since the world has reopened, the Women’s Big Bash League has predominately stayed at smaller venues and still not being sold out.

Not only has cricket dropped the ball on a domestic front, the WBBL has fallen behind its competitors overseas, such as The Hundred in England and the Women’s Premier League in India.

The WBBL celebrated the 10th anniversary this year showing that Cricket Australia had the foresight to get ahead of England and India but has now been overtaken.

The Hundred was launched in 2021 where the women played alongside the men. The tournament has been extremely successful with clubs playing their men’s and women’s team in back-to-back games 30 minutes apart.

The WBBL did that with the BBL but with as much as 90-minute between games with few sticking around to watch the men, nor coming in early to watch the women. Now the WBBL and BBL are played at different times over the summer.

The WPL, the equivalent of the Indian Premier League, broke all records in early 2023 when the BCCI sold the five teams for a whopping $806 million.

And they say there is no money in women’s sport.

To add to this, all matches of the Hundred and WPL are all televised with use of the decision review system which is not used in the WBBL.

Whilst there is still a long way to go in terms of competing with the now leading T20 leagues and getting more fans through the gates, despite a 23 per cent increase in attendance, the one thing that the WBBL has in spades, is talent.

Any player that has played in all three competitions will always state that the WBBL is the hardest competition to play in. Our domestic players are hardened cricketers.

So how do we fix the problem and become top dog again? Just like anything in this world, it takes money. Understanding that there isn’t an endless pit of money, Cricket Australia may have to be clever about its spending on promoting the game.

Take the advertising dollars that have been spent on the Border-Gavaskar men’s Test series. My question would be to CA, isn’t this and probably the Ashes the two most anticipated series on our calendar where tickets and coverage go through the roof?

Why not spend those dollars on the women’s game to elevate it, but more importantly telling as many people as possible about the fixtures.

People I talk to as I travel the country covering the WBBL for Channel 7 are always surprised that there is a game on in their city and tell me they had known about it, they would have gone.

I hope the women’s Ashes is a different story in the new year, as we celebrate 90 years of women’s Test cricket with a day-nighter at the MCG —the first of its kind on that ground.