Social media has made sexism in cricket journalism vicious and relentless

Sexism directed at women who cover cricket is nothing new. But a new first-person account argues that social media has transformed a long-standing occupational hazard into a relentless, organised and frequently violent campaign. The writer, a veteran of more than two decades in cricket journalism, traces how politics, colourism and gender prejudice outside the boundary rope have fused into a new reality of online abuse. Her career began in the press box at Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium, at an India versus England one-day international roughly 24 years ago. England won that match by five runs and Andrew Flintoff's shirt-twirling celebration annoyed Sourav Ganguly. From there, the 2026 ODI World Cup, the 2026-08 'Monkeygate' controversy, the 2026 T20 World Cup and the 2026 World Cup appear as career markers rather than as matches under analysis. Interviews with Shane Warne, Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar, and the editing of 'Tendulkar in Wisden', indicate that the journalist at the receiving end of the abuse is not a marginal figure but an established, award-winning professional. She recalls the old 'bubble'. Cricket media was comparatively sheltered: only people who knew journalists personally could comment, and editorial gatekeeping across print and broadcast acted as a buffer. That world has collapsed. Influencers on Instagram and TikTok now dominate traditional cricket coverage. The new system runs on impressions. Newsrooms operate under what she calls an 'audit culture of metrics and data where everything is about the number of impressions'. Long shows are cut into one- and two-minute reels that function as 'trailers for the main show'. The result is that context-free, emotionally charged clips travel furthest — and hostility grows in exactly that gap. In her case the deluge followed a three-minute discussion segment in which she spoke about cheerleading and the politicisation of cricket. Earlier, the legendary Sunil Gavaskar had written that buying Pakistani players such as Abrar Ahmed would 'lead indirectly to the deaths of Indian soldiers and civilians', a reference to the Indian-owned Hundred franchise Sunrisers Leeds signing a Pakistani cricketer. She criticised that politicisation — and the abuse followed immediately. On cheerleading, her argument is that the practice is a Western import with no place in Indian sporting tradition, and that after 18 editions of the IPL the cheerleaders remain 'primarily Caucasian' in a country with a centuries-old obsession with light skin. She frames this as the fetishisation of white skin designed to titillate male audiences. As a benchmark she cites the NFL, where eight of 32 teams have dropped cheerleaders, with owners calling the practice sexist and degrading. The messages themselves are catalogued by the writer: 'get back in the kitchen', 'randi', claims that she is 'sleeping with powerful men to get the job', and demands to 'take her clothes off'. Racial abuse is layered on — 'black Indian bitch', 'servant who married her white English colonial master'. Political tags follow: 'traitor', 'libraandu'. One threat read, 'I hope you get stabbed in London by a militant', with a pointed reference to 'taxes of Abrar'. She draws a clear distinction between past and present. Earlier abuse was isolated and physical — groping in crowds, a stalker. Today it is a 'torrent of vicious micro-assaults'. The risk has shifted from episodic to chronic. The risk is also multi-dimensional. Gender, politics and race intersect, so no single remedy will work. Most troubling is the apparent absence of any institutional mechanism: no governing body, board or league authority is shown intervening to protect journalists. When a former national captain and prominent broadcaster frames a routine overseas signing as a national-security matter, personal opinion begins to function as institutional signalling, and the line blurs further. The industry-level effects are plain. Gatekept legacy media is being displaced by influencer and reel-driven content. Broadcasters lose ground, and the South Asian heartland market absorbs an outrage culture. The gravest damage is to the talent pipeline, as fear of such abuse deters women from entering cricket journalism. Platform and franchise revenues, meanwhile, keep rising — a textbook negative externality, with the gains and the costs landing in different places. The core problem is not merely the foul language of some users. It is a system in which outrage generates the most engagement and context-free clips travel furthest, making misogyny not an accident but an inevitable output of the business model. Three interventions are needed: physical and psychological protection for journalists, an institutional refusal to politicise cricket, and editorial standards that decouple reach metrics from content decisions. Otherwise a significant share of those who report the game from outside the camera frame may quietly leave the profession — and cricket coverage itself will be the poorer for it.