White Ferns vs Women in Blue: When Cricket Becomes the World’s Smallest Soap Opera

When the White Ferns met the Women in Blue under the floodlights of Hamilton last week, the planet did not stop spinning, oil prices remained volatile, and the glaciers of Patagonia continued their sullen retreat. Yet, somewhere between the 35th over and the inevitable PowerPoint presentation of “key learnings,” the New Zealand Women versus India Women fixture quietly became a Rorschach test for everyone who insists sport is either a metaphor for geopolitics or merely a very well-lit distraction from it.

Let’s start with the obvious: this was not 1983, nor 2007, nor any of the sepia-tinted boy’s-own highlights reels that Indian broadcasters trot out whenever the men’s side needs a ratings defibrillator. This was two professional teams, paid actual money—some of it even approaching the male median wage!—trying to remember whether the latest ICC regulation demands 11 or 12 fielders outside the 30-yard circle. That the match drew a respectable global streaming audience in the mid-eight-figures tells you less about cricket’s reach than about the universal human desire to watch other humans fail in high definition. Schadenfreude, after all, is the last reliable export of our species.

From a strictly tactical angle, New Zealand’s Sophie Devine produced the sort of innings that makes middle-aged men in consultancy firms claim they too could have gone pro “if only I’d had the right coaching at 14.” Her 87 off 58 balls was less an act of batsmanship than a PowerPoint deck titled “Everything Wrong With Your Life Choices,” delivered with a follow-through. India, in reply, discovered that asking Harmanpreet Kaur to bat, captain, and solve the subcontinent’s inflation crisis simultaneously may be one portfolio too many. The middle order collapsed with the grace of a hedge fund during margin call, and the required run rate ballooned like a crypto market cap on a bored billionaire’s tweet.

But zoom out. The contest was broadcast live in 122 territories, which is roughly 116 more than the number of countries that could reliably explain the Duckworth-Lewis method at gunpoint. In Lagos sports bars, Kenyan Uber drivers paused between rides to watch on cracked phones; in Toronto, Sri Lankan dentists streamed it on clinic tablets while patients pretended to care about fluoride. Cricket’s empire, unlike Britannia’s, never really set; it just switched SIM cards and kept streaming. That the women’s game now piggybacks on this accidental satellite network is either progress or proof that late capitalism will monetize anything that twitches, including hope.

Meanwhile, the boards that run these outfits remain locked in the eternal pas de deux of pretending to care about gender equity while scheduling matches on weekdays between reruns of men’s highlights. New Zealand Cricket handed the team a bonus that, divided 15 ways, would barely cover a semester of American student debt. The BCCI, flush with IPL broadcast lucre, responded by upgrading the squad from economy to premium economy on the flight home—an act of generosity roughly equivalent to Jeff Bezos tipping the barista in Starbucks.

Still, something shifts. Indian newspapers that once buried women’s scores behind the classifieds now place them adjacent to full-page ads for mutual funds—an upgrade, if you grade on the curve of late-stage capitalism. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, asked about the result, managed to praise the team without once using the word “girls,” which in 2024 passes for statesmanship. And somewhere in Mumbai, a ten-year-old with a plastic bat rewatched Smriti Mandhana’s cover drive until the pixels bled, proving that soft power sometimes comes disguised as a looping .gif.

The final margin—34 runs—will be forgotten by Thursday, swallowed by the churn of an internet that’s already moved on to the next outrage about avocado prices or election denial. But the broader significance endures: two groups of women played a game with skill, spite, and the occasional slow-motion hair flick, and the sky refused to fall. Given the current global baseline—rising seas, falling democracies, the stubborn persistence of kale—that counts as a win for all of us.