SHARJAH: It has been two years since former India cricketer Snehal Pradhan took over as Manager of women's cricket at the International Cricket Council. In the time since, the global body has conducted two senior T20 World Cups, the maiden U19 WC, and have laid out a pathway for the growth of the women's game in the next decade. Sitting on the sidelines of the ongoing T20 World Cup in Dubai, Pradhan spoke to The New Indian Express about the work that goes behind the scenes, cricket's inclusion in the Olympics, the way ahead and more.
Excerpts:
There was a huge keenness to have the tournament in Bangladesh because we know that Bangladesh as a cricket-crazy market would have really turned out to support the tournament. Unfortunately, we couldn't go ahead with that. It is important to acknowledge that Bangladesh is still the host of the tournament. From ICC's perspective, we're grateful and lucky to have partners like the Emirates Cricket Board, who are used to putting up world-class sporting events on such short notice, especially cricket events.
So, I think there was a lot of confidence, despite having only five weeks' turnaround time, that the Emirates Cricket Board would be able to deliver a world-class event. Huge credit to them, and huge credit to our events team, who have worked on a number of events back to back, some of them fairly challenging.
It's something that we've seen very successfully on the men's side of things. With the Men's T20 World Cup, played in West Indies in the USA, expanding to 20 teams, fantastic performances were put in across teams, not just full member teams, but associate member teams as well. And I think what has probably got the sport in the place where we could expand was the organic growth of the women's game over the last few years. Starting from 2017, ICC's investment in women's events has been steadily progressing. 2017 was the first time every match was broadcast or streamed. 2018 was the first standalone T20 World Cup.
In 2020, there were 86,174 (attendance at Melbourne Cricket Ground for the T20 World Cup Final). In 2023 we went to a market (South Africa) where women's cricket had never sold tickets before that season to sell out Newlands for the final was a fantastic result. If you like to plot the trajectory of that, it's all pointing upwards. With the expansion of the T20 World Cup, the ICC board fully felt that this was the natural progression of how the women's game can grow and should grow.
It is an extremely strong indicator of the fact that this investment, whether it's by ICC into our events, whether it's by members into their own national team programs and domestic team programs is warranted. It's not just the right thing to do, but it is the smart business decision because when you provide high-quality teams in a tournament where the ICC has such a large social media following. And then those team's performances are showcased.
We have a great digital team who do their best to maximize the fact that the ICC has this amazing social media following. There's like when there's a women's event, that event becomes the focus of the ICC social media handles. We are blessed to have a very strong storytelling mechanism with our digital channels and there are great stories to be called.
ICC has six strategic priority projects. One of those was Olympic inclusion, with the ambition to pursue inclusion as a core sport. It's not just about being in LA 2028, but we would like to be in the Olympics forever. One of the biggest development benefits of that is that in every country, especially your non-traditional cricket markets, the funding structures are built around the Olympic programs.
So very often, National Olympic Committees will give you funding if you are part of an Olympic program. If you're not, you're kind of locked out of that system. To be able to unlock the huge support network that exists through the Olympic solidarity program, which, I think, has close to $600 million of investment over four years, over all the countries who are eligible through that program. So that is team support grants, athletes support grants, and coach education grants. Those benefits are now unlocked for teams, for countries. And that was one of the biggest underlying drivers.
From my perspective, I'm excited because that benefit is now open and it is expected to be used in a gender parity way. We saw the Paris Olympics being a 50-50 event for the first time. The Olympics itself has a huge movement of gender parity within the Olympics. And for cricket to influence how funding flows into organisations is a great thing for the women's game because there will be funding available for women's programs.
ICC getting to the decision where they got prize money parity, put us in a good position in that entire Olympic conversation because we could visibly demonstrate that there is a value alignment with us in the Olympic movement.
I look at it as me being extremely blessed. It has been a journey because I'm counting the years since I started playing cricket. So if you go back to that, I've been involved in the game for 20-plus years. In some capacity or the other. But this capacity has been eye-opening in understanding the amount of complexity that goes into the things that we see around us. It's like that analogy of the duck. Smoothly cruising on top and from below the feet are beating like crazy. It has made me appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into the running of cricket events in general. And the growth of the women's game that we have seen especially in the last few years. There have been a lot of people who have put in a lot of effort before me especially to get us to where we are right now.