MCC to allow women’s Varsity match to be played on main Lord’s square from next year

Lavender’s feedback come after Vanessa Picker, Oxford’s captain from 2017-20, had written to senior members of the membership saying that “denying the women’s Blues entry to Lord’s, whereas permitting our male counterparts to keep unique entry, reinforces damaging narratives concerning the inferiority of feminine cricketers.”

It’s understood that Oxford and Cambridge cricket golf equipment made a request to the MCC final year to stage a girls’s T20 or Hundred match on the main square at Lord’s instantly earlier than the boys’s recreation. The proposal was rejected, with the MCC believing it will not be sensible to match 140 overs right into a single day.

Roisin McCallion, a former Oxford pupil from the Stump Out Sexism marketing campaign, mentioned that makes an attempt – led by Picker – to transfer the ladies’s Varsity Match to Lord’s had been underway for 2½ years. McCallion claimed that, when the matter was raised, “Oxford and Cambridge advised us that it wasn’t even price approaching.

“Had they requested 2½ years in the past when this was first began, the ladies might have been handled in an equitable method to the boys since then.”

Jonathan Orders, the chairman of Oxford College Cricket Membership, mentioned: “I used to be shocked Vanessa wrote to MCC about this, because the schedule of Varsity matches and their venues was very amicably agreed by our committee, which clearly contains the ladies’s part, again in November. After all, we take the problems Vanessa raises very significantly and they’re topic to ongoing dialogue. I can guarantee you the event of girls’s cricket is a excessive precedence for each universities, and each unis merged the boys’s and girls’s sections lately with this goal in thoughts.”

McCallion mentioned that equality for the Varsity match for women and men was solely the primary ambition of the Stump Out Sexism marketing campaign.

“If the Varsity match is sorted, the next factor in our marketing campaign would be to enhance year on year the variety of women’s fixtures played at Lord’s, and in addition to get a direct dedication on paper from the MCC, that they may commit to working according to the ECB technique to enhance the involvement of girls and women in cricket throughout the next few years,” she mentioned.

“The vital factor to emphasise is, we do not see this is a matter of 1 group or two groups being handled badly. We see this as symbolic of the broader mistreatment of girls in sport.”