The Second Chair in the Press Box: Hatred Against Women Cricket Journalists Is Now a Daily Job

The last row of the Salt Lake Stadium. 2026, the Kolkata Derby, Mohun Bagan against East Bengal, 63,000 in the stands. Forty-five journalists in the press box, and one woman among them — me. The senior colleague in the next chair put down his cup of tea and said, "Women don't understand the offside trap." I did not file a report on the 1-1 scoreline that evening. I wrote 1,200 words on the sound of the crowd, and I re-watched twelve hours of footage to correct a chant I had misidentified.

From the last row, the whole pitch looked like a rumour of belonging. That night I thought the hardest task was reaching that chair. Eight years later I know that reaching it was half the fight; the other half is staying in it — and that fight is no longer staged in a stadium. It is staged in a feed.

A long, first-person piece in The Guardian by a woman cricket journalist measures exactly this distance. Her first ODI assignment was at the Wankhede 24 years ago — India against England, England winning by five runs, Andrew Flintoff sprinting across the outfield twirling his shirt. Some time later, Sourav Ganguly repeated the gesture at Lord's. There were two women in the press contingent then. Today the abuse is spread across thousands of accounts.

The strength of her argument is her record. The 2026 World Cup, the 2026-08 Australia series remembered as Monkeygate, the 2026 T20 World Cup, the 2026 World Cup. Interviews with Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne and Brian Lara. A spell as cricket editor at NDTV 24x7. Then a return to cricket coverage through The Scoop. It is the same route many of us have taken — print to digital, digital to broadcast, broadcast to the reel.

In 2026 she wrote a piece on the male gaze and cheerleader recruitment in IPL broadcasts. It went viral, and what came back was not argument — it was "she's jealous", "she's selling feminism". Ten years later, when she returned to broadcasting, the weather had changed. Instagram and TikTok had become part of cricket coverage, ninety-second reels were cut from long shows, and impressions had begun deciding what gets made. In the old world, the day ended when you left the press box. In the new one, the day never ends.

The sharpest attack, meanwhile, came over a remark about cricket's politics. Sunil Gavaskar had said that buying Pakistani players could indirectly contribute to the deaths of Indian soldiers and civilians. She challenged it — in the same period when Sunrisers Leeds, the Indian-owned Hundred franchise, selected the Pakistani spinner Abrar Ahmed. What came back was gendered insults, sexualised remarks, racist slurs, political accusations, and one explicit threat of physical harm.

There are two distinct problems here, and collapsing them into one is the easiest mistake to make. The press box problem was exclusion — gatekeeping, two chairs, the sentence about women not understanding. The feed problem is contact — no gate, no wall, and therefore no shelter either. Both rest on the same premise: that a woman's presence in cricket must be justified every time, while a man's is simply assumed.

Second, this is not a question of manners. It is a question of business model. When forty minutes of discussion become ninety seconds of reel, the part that gets cut is context. The part that survives is the line that stops a thumb. And the line that stops a thumb is usually the one where a woman challenges a powerful man. The clip-maker gets impressions, the platform gets advertising, the publisher gets reach — and the woman gets the threat printed under the clip.

It is worth stating plainly who owns this structure. The BCCI owns the IPL, the broadcast rights are auctioned, the platforms sell the advertising, franchise valuations rise, and Indian ownership money flows into foreign leagues like The Hundred. Across that entire chain, the risk is recorded in exactly one place — the name of the person who was sitting in front of the camera. No balance sheet carries a line item called correspondent safety. That is the real story, and it never fits in a tweet.

The Gavaskar episode should be read this way: Abrar Ahmed's selection was a recruitment decision. It was converted into a national-security debate. And the journalist who asked a question inside that debate was declared an enemy of the nation. The sequence is not new in cricket, but its speed is. The most telling detail is that the replies did not attack her argument. They attacked her body, her sexuality, her race and her political loyalty. When the reply moves from the argument to the identity, the argument has already been won.

The cheerleader passage matters because it exposes the economic morality underneath. Questioning the IPL's recruitment of largely fair-skinned foreign cheerleaders is a way of naming colourism and patriarchy in the same breath. She cited the NFL, where, on her account, eight of thirty-two teams have dropped cheerleading squads; that figure is not independently verified here and should be read with care. The logic holds regardless: the economy that sells a woman's body as entertainment is the same economy that punishes the woman who asks for the accounts.

Watch the language shift too. In 2026 I was told women don't understand the offside trap. Today the same thought arrives in new clothes: she's only saying this for attention. The grammar is identical — the question is never what she said, only how she earned the right to say it. That suspicion used to be whispered in a newsroom. Now it is shouted from thousands of accounts, with the threat attached.

The great collective forgetting is that we file 2026 away as a "moment" — a viral piece, a debate, a few days of noise. We do not file it as a warning. Had the industry accepted then that a woman speaking publicly about cricket carries an occupational risk, moderation, legal support and threat protocols would be permanent editorial budget lines today. They are not, because the industry quietly decided that hatred is the price of visibility.

The second misconception is that social media democratised cricket media. Half true. It democratised the audience — Bengali, Tamil and Hindi commentary now arrives on the same phone that plays the reel. But it made the risk not democratic. It made it individual. In a press box you could take a colleague's behaviour to an editor; there was at least a place to complain. A feed has a block button, and a block button is not a human resources department.

And what is missing from this entire scene is a name. The piece can name Gavaskar, name Abrar Ahmed, name Sunrisers Leeds. It cannot name the man who threatened to kill her. The hatred is documented; the hater is anonymous. That asymmetry should have been the real subject of the debate.

What to watch next is clear enough. First, whether publishers make moderation and staff safety a standing budget line, or dismiss it as "the social media team's job". Second, whether the regional commentary benches of the WPL and the women's World Cup — Bengali, Tamil, Hindi — build a new listening public that learns a new vocabulary rather than inheriting an old grudge. Third, whether the broadcast promises around the 2026 women's World Cup hold, because whether women sit in the commentary box of a game women built is the most honest question of the next two years.

The press box taught me that seeing everything can still feel like missing the point. From the last row you see the whole ground, but you do not see the handshake. That evening at Salt Lake I thought the fight was about a chair. Now I know it is about a sentence that keeps following you long after the chair is yours. The question is not whether women understand cricket. The question is when cricket will grant them the audacity to be understood.