A batsman by any other name

Why language matters in sport

Last week I wrote about the word choice of journalist Gideon Haigh, when he said that the England women’s team were “probably the worst team ever to be gifted a Test match at the MCG.”

Despite the fact that the clip was shared quite widely, there wasn’t a lot of discussion around Haigh’s word choice, but it seemed to resonate with a lot of people who responded to my post. So this week I wanted to take a deeper dive into the importance of the language we use in sport.

Once again cricket is a prime example, littered as it is with terminology from its days as a ‘gentlemen’s game’. From batsman to nightwatchman, third man to man of the match and my least favourite of all - the clunky fieldsman, which was removed from the Laws of Cricket 25 years ago, but somehow still gets regularly dusted off by commentators whose own playing careers are more recent than the official use of this word.

Recently in Australia, we have seen some of the former greats of the men’s game - including Mike Hussey, Brad Haddin and Brett Lee - in commentary for the women’s Ashes Test, seemingly as a nod from those in charge of the broadcast to the importance of this match. Naturally these men all slipped up now and then, with references to ‘batsmen’ and ‘fieldsmen’, which they usually corrected - though I did enjoy Hussey coining the term ‘nightwatchie’ at one stage.

The point is not to pick on individual men for their use of a term that is irrelevant to the women’s game, but to look at the broader picture of why these terms are in use and what relevance they have in the modern game. Hussey, Haddin and Lee should not have had to worry about slipping up and using the wrong words in women’s cricket, because the language prescribed by the MCC in the Laws of Cricket should be so ingrained that they use it naturally when calling either men’s or women’s cricket.

I have long been an advocate for gender neutral language being used across sport, not just in women’s sport. If ‘batsmen’ is used in men’s cricket and ‘batters’ in women’s cricket, then the latter is no longer a gender neutral term. It comes to mean ‘female batters’ and then we are once again trapped in a pattern of gendering the terminology, whether or not we use a traditionally feminine suffix.

So why does this matter? Language may seem unimportant to some - especially if they already feel included by the ‘traditional’ terms. But these words embody a history of the sport that locked women out - quite literally in the case of the Long Room at Lord’s, which women were not allowed to enter until 1999. They are words that were chosen specifically to represent those who were deemed to belong in the game. And as such, they also clearly denote who does not belong.

Sure, if you use the word ‘batsman’ to describe a man who is batting, that is technically correct. But it also carries on the ‘tradition’ of male as the default gender, grounding the sport in the masculine domain. Continuing these linguistic ‘traditions’ in the men’s game, while using newer terminology in the women’s game allows people to consider men’s cricket the ‘true’ form of the game.

It creates a divide between men’s and women’s cricket - the kind of divide that leads us down the path of thinking women must be “gifted” Test matches at prestigious venues and require separate honour boards for their inherently less valuable milestones. It leads to the situation where the most prominent domestic competitions in Australia are called the Big Bash League and the Women’s Big Bash League - a naming convention that clearly sets the default gender as male.

I’m not so naïve as to believe that a simple change in language will fix all the problems the sport faces - or even all its problems with gender equality. However, I do think it is a battle worth fighting. Words may be small, but they send a message and make a clear case for who is included and who isn’t.

And if you are ever faced by a man who strongly believes this doesn’t matter, start persistently referring to all the players in the men’s game as batswomen and fieldswomen and awarding a Woman of the Match each week and see how strongly they feel about the importance of language.