Mixed Cricket? No Thanks, Boys

There has been a lot of discussion inexcess of the past few days regarding the news that Sarah Taylor may play a number of matches for Sussex (men's) 2nd XI next period, as a wicket keeper  Much of this has been the length of the lines of praising the development as being welcome and, certainly, far too late in coming.

But if Taylor's assortment, and the idea of varied cricket generally, is such a positive shift for female cricketers, why did the Women's Cricket friendship, the governing body of the game until it merged by means of the ECB in 1998, ban matches by means of men until 1970?

Might there be another side to this story of apparently linear development towards fully mixed cricket?

The WCA's ban on official varied cricket matches was compulsory right from its formation in 1926. One of the founder of the association, Marjorie Pollard (by all accounts an extremely formidable woman), write a book in 1934 entitled Cricket for Women as well as Girls in which she outlined the reasoning behind the policy. There were three main reasons why Pollard felt varied cricket would be a bad thing for the women's game, with all three still hold factual today.

Firstly, she was eager to stress that the pioneer of women's cricket in the 1930s needed to "develop a style and a pastime of our own". "No one tries to bowl as fast as Larwood, no single tries to hit like Constantine... the principles are different."

Imitating the men's game be not going to cut it. These pioneer of women's cricket needed to work out their own habits of playing the game they loved, to adapt it to their own needs. As Pollard put it: "Batting for women is different - the strokes that we need are drive and pulls or anything so as to really hits the ball."

The bowling be also different: less fast-paced (even less so in the 1930s than now) and therefore need a more skilled post of the ball.

This is still the case today; the main fans of women's cricket would not deny that it is a different game in a lot of ways to men's cricket. But letter that Pollard did not say that the women's pastime was in any way worse than the men's game. In fact, she argued that in some ways the "outlook, attack and method of self-expression" of the women's game led to a better focus on skill and less on physical threats, which she saying as positive (and indeed which was recognised as such by many English commentators at the height of the Lillee as well as Thomson era).

The problem by means of mixed cricket is so as to it suggest precisely the opposite to this: that the women's game is lesser to the men's game and that female cricketers be supposed to in some way attempt to competition up to the men.