Two Chairs in the Press Box: Sexism, the Reels Economy and the Online Siege of Women in Cricket Media

At 2:40 in the morning in Brisbane, a screenshot opened on my laptop: a message sent to a woman cricket journalist in which the subject of debate was not her commentary but her body. I read it three times. All three times, one thing was clear — there was no cricket in it.

That same week I found a first-person piece in a British newspaper in which a senior cricket journalist set out the ledger of roughly twenty-four years in the trade. It opens at Wankhede — an India–England one-day international, England winning by five runs, Andrew Flintoff running across the outfield twirling his shirt. It ends somewhere cricket does not reach: a woman's name, and beneath it, hundreds of comments.

What changed between those two screenshots is bigger than technology. What changed is that the address of the hatred is now public, while the bill still arrives in one journalist's name.

I began my career on the sports desk of a Mumbai newspaper. That desk had two chairs for women. One was occupied, one was empty — and the computer on the empty chair had not been switched off.

I cannot confirm which paper the source piece appeared in, or on what date. That uncertainty is itself the first fact of this story: the paperwork of damage is usually as blurred as the people who absorb it. What is clear is the shape of the career — a reporter who entered the Wankhede press box around 2026 and returned to cricket in the era of Instagram and TikTok. In between she covered the 2026 World Cup, the 2026–08 Australia series remembered as Monkeygate, the 2026 T20 World Cup and the 2026 World Cup, and interviewed Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne and Brian Lara.

That résumé matters because the oldest weapon against criticism is to claim the critic lacks experience. Here the ledger is complete. What is missing is not experience. It is protection.

One line in the piece outweighs the rest: in her early years there were only two women in the press contingent. Two. In the whole group. And when she returned, she was measured against her male predecessor — one chair, two claimants.

In 2026 she wrote about IPL cheerleaders and the male gaze of the broadcast. The column went viral. The reply used words like jealousy, feminism, envy. A decade later she had been a cricket editor at NDTV 24x7, and then came back to the sport through a digital show. What met her on return was not the old press box. It was a room whose walls were a comment section.

The first count: chairs in the press box

A press box is never neutral ground. Seats, power points, commentary positions, interview slots — all of it is allocated. When a contingent has two women, the shortfall is not merely numerical. It becomes an information shortfall, because a reporter who is not in the room does not hear the conversation where the story is actually decided.

The under-representation of women in cricket media is not a seasonal coincidence; it is the output of a hiring habit. And changing a habit is harder than performing it. That is why so many newsrooms have women reporters and no women commentators, women voices and no women decision-makers.

In 2026 at Derby I watched Harmanpreet Kaur make 171 not out from 115 balls against Australia. The roar hit 171 that evening; by the sixth act I heard the silence underneath it. Part of that silence was how few of the people covering the innings were women. The game was changing. The room was not.

The second count: 2026 and the envy label

When a woman journalist questions cricket's entertainment architecture, the reply does not arrive as argument. It arrives as a diagnosis: she is bitter. The manoeuvre is efficient because it moves the debate off its subject.

When an argument is renamed envy, the debate does not end — the person making it is removed from it. And the removal is polished enough to be called wit rather than censorship.

Worth recording: the 2026 column was not about whether cheerleaders should exist. It was about selection — why almost every IPL season produces the same narrow palette of fair-skinned, foreign performers. That question touches colourism and patriarchy at once, which may be why it is unbearable. She cited the NFL, where eight of thirty-two teams have reportedly dropped cheerleading. That is her attributed figure, not independently verified here, and it functions as comparison: the largest entertainment market in the world has already asked the question. Cricket has not finished asking it.

The third count: the economics of reels

Cricket coverage now travels through Instagram and TikTok. Long shows are cut into one- to three-minute reels. Impressions and audience metrics enter editorial decisions. A short clip reaches viewers who never heard the original discussion.

In a short clip the context is cut, and what gets cut travels fastest. This is design, not accident. Two minutes cannot carry an argument, only a posture. Posture produces reaction; argument produces disagreement. Reaction is measurable. So reaction is what gets made.

I was in the room at the IPL mega auction in Bengaluru in January 2026, when Jaydev Unadkat went to Rajasthan Royals for Rs 11.5 crore and Ben Stokes to the same franchise for Rs 12.5 crore. I recorded that room as a stock exchange of hope. Its defining feature was that every bid was public and every price was visible. Cricket media's new room is not like that. The price is visible — views, impressions, shares — but the bidder never is.

The fourth count: a taxonomy of abuse

The piece records gendered slurs, sexualised attacks, racist language, political accusations about whose agenda she serves, and one explicit threat of physical violence.

The distance between a threat and a criticism is hard to measure, so the industry files both under one heading and calls it feedback.

The taxonomy matters because each category needs different medicine. Slurs need moderation. Threats need a security assessment. Racist abuse needs institutional action. Political accusation needs only one thing — editorial courage, the willingness to treat a difficult question as part of the job rather than a disciplinary matter.

When all four arrive in one inbox, the journalist has one strategy left: shrink. Write less. Say less. Smile past the contentious subject. That strategy appears in no policy document and operates in every newsroom.

The fifth count: Gavaskar, Abrar Ahmed and The Hundred

The sharpest passage is where cricket, politics and franchise ownership collide. Sunil Gavaskar questioned Indian-owned Hundred franchises buying Pakistani players, arguing — as the piece reports — that it indirectly contributes to the deaths of Indian soldiers and civilians. Sunrisers Leeds' selection of Abrar Ahmed became the centre of that argument. The writer challenged the reasoning, and what followed landed on her, not on the player.

Buying a player is a cricket decision, but the bill is paid at the political counter — and the person standing at that counter is usually a journalist.

This reminds me of my own error. In 2026 I wrote a three-part film on sixty IPL matches played in empty UAE grounds. My producer shipped forty hours of rushes of almost nothing — unoccupied seats, groundstaff raking, the hum of air conditioning. I thought a film without a crowd had no poetry in it. I was wrong. From that film I kept one habit: a silence pass before every script, a deliberate look at what is not being said.

Run a silence pass on this story and what surfaces is that the journalists who absorbed the most abuse were also the least heard.

The sixth count: cheerleaders, colour and the market

The piece also touches a market where the female body is product and criticism of it becomes product too. Questioning cheerleading, questioning the preference for fair skin, questioning the male gaze — these are links in one chain.

In a market where the female body is part of the entertainment, the woman criticising that body becomes entertainment as well. That is where commentary and content stop being different things, and the journalist turns into a character who is watched rather than heard.

The seventh count: who pays for moderation

Here my own trade asks me a question. I write documentary scripts. Much of the work is deciding what to show and what to cut. When a platform decides which comment stays and which goes, it is doing the same work — without the editorial accountability I carry.

The cost of safety still comes out of the journalist's own pocket, paid in hours, in sleep, and in conversations not had. No newsroom shows that line in its budget. No franchise writes it into a broadcast contract. It is paid daily, and nobody invoices for it.

Now the part where I disagree with my own industry.

Collective memory says social media made this vicious. I think that is half true, and half a truth is dangerous because it hides the other half.

The violence was already there. What changed is its address. Abuse once arrived by email, reached an editor's cabin and was quietly buried. Discrimination once showed up in assignments — the copy desk shift from which no byline grows. None of it was recorded, so none of it was considered real. Social media did not invent the hatred. It made it public, permanent and measurable. The distinction matters, because if the problem is the platform, the fix is in the platform; if the problem is the room, the fix is in the room. Neither fix has been made.

My second disagreement is with the nostalgia threaded through the piece — the old, quiet, professional press box. I have sat in that box. It was quiet because very few people were allowed to argue in it. A room with two women in it looks courteous; it does not look shared. Remembering that courtesy as a golden age is remembering the exclusion the piece itself is complaining about.

My third disagreement is with the industry's favourite remedy: more women on screen. Necessary, and insufficient. More women on screen does not change the structure behind the screen. Representation is presentation; protection is structure. Until a contract contains a clause — what happens when a threat arrives, who answers, within how many hours, and whether the journalist is pulled off the work she was hired to do — every speech is unfinished.

Fourth, the least said thing. In an engagement market, the abuser is also a customer. His anger feeds the same metric that gets sold to advertisers. Asking a platform whose revenue runs on rage to suppress rage is asking a shopkeeper to withdraw his best-selling line. It is an ethical question, but first it is an accounting one.

And last, the thing that troubles me most. Context loss is not an accident. Someone decided to make a two-minute clip, and someone decided which sentence survived the cut. The moment context is cut is an editorial decision — and that decision never carries a byline.

Here is the image I want to leave this story on.

The Mumbai sports desk. Two chairs. One occupied, one empty. Twenty-two years later, a phone on my desk in Brisbane at 2:40 in the morning. Between those two scenes, how far cricket travelled — 171 at Derby, nine runs at Lord's, the Ahmedabad final, sixty matches in empty grounds, Rs 11.5 crore in an auction hall. And through all of it, one question standing exactly where it stood in 2026.

Next time a franchise announces the rising number of women in its press conferences, ask one thing: where is the safety clause in the contract? And next time a platform says moderation has improved, ask: how many hours does a reply take, and who holds the ledger?

An empty chair does not shout. It is simply counted. And right now, twenty-two years on, we keep forgetting to count.