It’s time for a little story. A story about the home of cricket: Lord’s Cricket Ground in London. A home which, for long, perhaps far too long, had no space for half the nation’s demographic.
Cricket has been played here since 1814, with the Marylebone Cricket Club, founded in 1787, being the institution that owns and runs the place today.
Lord’s became an official international Test venue in 1884 when it hosted one of the Tests in the Ashes, becoming the third venue in England to host Test cricket after The Oval and Old Trafford. It was only after making its debut on the world stage that Lord’s eventually got its famed pavilion. An ever-increasing demand for seats saw the venue undergo several changes, with the pavilion becoming one of the most iconic additions.
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Eventually, Lord’s also became a hub of power in the global game. In 1909, administrative authorities of the South African Cricket Association, the Australian Cricket Board and the MCC met to form the Imperial Cricket Conference, the beginnings of the International Cricket Council, or the ICC that we know today.
Then came the war in 1914. Lord’s went into the service of the British Army. Cooking and wireless instruction classes were held for military personnel at the ground. First-Class Cricket returned to the venue in 1919. The Second World War didn’t disrupt activities as much, and the venue wasn’t as badly impacted by the Blitz.
Cricket only grew more popular thereafter, with record footfall, gate receipts and frequency, and Lord’s firmly at the front and centre of it all. Women, however, didn’t feature very much in the venue’s early history. When they did, through requests to use its facilities or the venue itself, their presence was not only frowned upon in whispers over a drink in the now-famous Long Room of the Lord’s pavilion, but also quite publicly sneered at.
A women’s body to administer cricket took shape, as it would, near Victoria Station in London on October 4, 1926, when the Women’s Cricket Association, or the WCA, was formed. It would be the ruling body for the women’s game until 1998. By 1938, more than 100 clubs, 18 colleges and 85 schools were affiliated to the Association. Additionally, 18 second-tier bodies at the county level had also come up.
From 1929, the WCA sent requests to the MCC seeking access to Lord’s to play and train. England’s first recorded women’s game was way back in 1745. Over the decades that followed, the game grew, if only slowly, to consider accommodating women’s aspirations too. When the MCC refused, the WCA, the MCC’s official archives say, replied with a poem:
‘Fair’ plays a jewel, as you should discover,
You cruel men who’ve bowled a ‘Maiden’ over.
Think of the debt you owe us, which when paid is,
Will raise you from the ‘Ashes’ Lords and Ladies.
That the international game got a Women’s World Cup well before the men’s version came along is now common knowledge. In 1973, the first Women’s World Cup, in the one-day format, was held in England. That endeavour owed a whole lot to legendary England cricketer and former captain Rachael Heyhoe Flint. She spearheaded much of the early push for women’s cricket and took some help from her fellow Wolverhampton resident Sir Jack Hayward, who would go on to own football club Wolverhampton Wanderers, to finance tours for England’s women’s cricket team.
English women’s cricket owes a lot to the early faith shown by Sir Jack Hayward, who bankrolled the national side’s endeavours including the inaugural Women’s World Cup, which predated the men’s showpiece by two years. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
In an essay titled ‘When the women set the agenda’, cricket writer Jenny Thompson documents that Sir Jack Hayward was so impressed by the performances on the tours he funded that he pitched his idea of a World Cup to Sylvia Swinburne, the erstwhile president of the WCA. The body instantly agreed, and Hayward promptly coughed up 40,000 GBP towards the cost of staging the tournament.
He is believed to have said when questioned about his investment and if it was worth it: “I love women, and I love cricket. What could be better than to have the two rolled together?”
It hardly came as a surprise when Prudential pumped in 100,000 GBP into sponsoring the inaugural Men’s World Cup in 1975.
On the marketing front, the players involved and the Women’s Cricket Association handled promotional activities alongside their games too, be it printing fliers or spreading the word on local radio. Heyhoe Flint herself compiled match reports to send to the press after every game.
From the Archives | 1973: Cricketer Rachael Heyhoe-Flint at work in the commentary box at Wembley Stadium, London. She was television’s first woman sports commentator and also captain of the England Women’s cricket team. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Heyhoe Flint lobbied to have the final of the first Women’s World Cup in 1973 hosted at Lord’s. It would have been a fitting end after the preliminary stages were held on relatively obscure grounds across the country. England would go on to win this edition and etch its name in history as the inaugural champion, but that coronation would happen at Edgbaston in Birmingham after the MCC denied the WCA permission to use Lord’s.
Back then, she threatened the MCC, saying she would take the matter to the Equal Opportunities Committee. Persistent lobbying and one woman’s inability to take no for an answer meant the MCC relented, albeit three years later, in 1976.
August 4, 1976: Rachel Heyhoe-Flint, the captain of the English Women's cricket team leads her team onto the pitch for the first ever women's cricket match to be played at Lord's. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
On August 4, 1976, 50 years or so after women’s cricket came into being in England, Heyhoe Flint led her national side through the gates of the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord’s, the home of cricket, which for so long had no room for women. If you visit Lord’s today, quite fittingly, there is a gate named after the pioneering cricketer who helped shatter that barrier.
It was an England vs Australia one-day encounter that is looked back on quite fondly by the pathbreaking women, those alive today, who were part of that red-letter day for the women’s game in England. The differences in facilities from then to now are stark. Former England player Megan Lear said, “I remember going into the back of the changing rooms to the toilets, and there were plant pots in the urinals.” Those two teams managed under the strict watch of guards and members who ensured that they didn’t step anywhere they weren’t ‘supposed’ to be. The women, too, were cautious not to put a foot out of line.
Red roses were reportedly placed in the dressing room for the women players. They were permitted to enter the Long Room, but female supporters were still banned from the iconic pavilion, while women were not allowed into the Warner and Tavern Stands without a male companion. The crowd, though, still didn’t appreciate what some saw as a takeover of their turf by the ladies. The Daily Mail quoted patrons hoping for rain so they didn’t have to watch the women play.
Another member even said, “Cricket is a game where concentration is very important and women are the greatest distraction a man can have around.”
When women featured sporadically around Lord’s in requests to use facilities or the venue itself, not only was it frowned upon in the whispers over a drink in the now-famous long room of the Lord’s pavilion, it was quite publicly sneered upon, too. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
England and Australia, Ashes rivals in the men’s game, have seen a sprightly tussle for bragging rights in the women’s game too. Fittingly, Lord’s has been part of the lore, with the ceremonial ‘Ashes’ officially created here for the women’s series. In 1998, a miniature bat signed by both teams was burned in a wok alongside a constitution of the recently dissolved WCA. These ‘Ashes’ were then placed in a trophy.
Since then, 18 women’s ODIs have been held at Lord’s, with England hosting Australia, India, South Africa and New Zealand at the venue. Two of these were World Cup finals, in 1993 and 2017: England won both.
In the shortest format of the game, Lord’s has seen seven T20Is, including two World Cup finals in 2009 and 2026. England emerged victorious in 2009, the inaugural edition of the Women’s T20 World Cup, beating New Zealand, but the host wasn’t as lucky in 2026, going down to Australia in the summit clash.
Lord’s has been the home to London Spirit as well in The Hundred.
But the overarching discourse has been marked by a degree of hostility, if one may call it that, between the MCC and women who wanted to play and watch cricket. Membership of the club was not permitted for women until 1998. Heyhoe Flint had been applying for nearly a decade, and it never went down well with the existing clergymen of the sport.
In the early 1990s, Heyhoe Flint applied under the name R. Flint so as to escape any scrutiny. When her cunning was discovered, it was followed by some shock and the fastest of rejections. She kept applying, and finally, in 1999, she became one of the first 10 women admitted to the MCC as an honorary member. She also became the first woman to serve on the MCC committee. She then became a board member of the England and Wales Cricket Board, which absorbed the women’s game after the WCA’s dissolution, much like the BCCI did with the Women’s Cricket Association of India (WCAI) here. Heyhoe Flint was also the first woman to be inducted into the Cricket Hall of Fame.
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Eight of the first ten honorary Women MCC members from left to right, Rachael Heyhoe-Flint, Netta Rheinberg, Sheila Hill, Carole Cornthwaite, Audrey Collins, Diana Rait Kerr, Jackie Court and Norma Izard holding their membership cards at Lords for the first time on March 16th, 1999 at Lords in London, England. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
By hook or by crook, women have constantly knocked at the doors of the ‘home of cricket’. It wasn’t just English citizens attempting to gain access. Even India’s own Diana Edulji experienced a reportedly unsavoury tryst with the MCC when she was denied entry to the pavilion in 1986, when India toured England. She famously labelled the club and its members as “male chauvinist pigs.”
Now, these two nations, whose destinies have been intertwined in more avenues than one, will be the protagonists of a historic Test match, the first Women’s Test at the venue in its more than two-century-old legacy. In contrast, the venue hosted its 150th men’s Test recently, when England blew away New Zealand to register its solitary win in a controversy-marred three-match series.
What truly set the wheels turning was a stinging report that laid the MCC’s biases bare.
In 2023, a 317-page report published by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket sharply criticised the MCC for its apathy towards women’s cricket, stating “The ‘home of cricket’ was still a home principally for men.”
The report pulled up the MCC for its scheduling choices, saying they pointed to values “that had no place in contemporary Britain.”
It also underlined how appalling it was that the national women’s side had never played a Test on the hallowed turf at Lord’s.
“Guaranteeing a tiny number of schoolboys the right to play at Lord’s every year when millions of children are denied that right is completely unacceptable. So too is the fact that the schoolboys of two expensive and elite institutions get to play at Lord’s every year when the England Women’s national team have yet to play a Test Match there. The Oxford and Cambridge match has also had its time and should no longer be played at Lord’s. It sends a similar message of elitism, entrenching the position of certain institutions to which only a small minority of school pupils will gain access,” the report bluntly stated.
India and England’s most recent clash was at the D.Y. Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai in 2023. India marched to a massive 347-run triumph then. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI
Soon enough, this fixture that will be played from Friday, made its way into the calendar, placed poignantly after the conclusion of a home World Cup. This was no coincidence, as the tournament director of the Women’s T20 World Cup, Beth Barrett-Wild, explained to this publication.
“This summer, straight after the final at Lord’s on July 5, we have the Test match against India starting on July 10. We then have the Women’s Domestic T20 Finals – the Vitality Blast. That’s on July 17 at The Oval, and then we have The Hundred from July 21. So, here you have the opportunity of discovery in the World Cup and the chance to stay with those players after the global event and deepen the connection with them,” Barrett-Wild said ahead of the World Cup.
This Test brings together the founding nation of the sport and its most formidable force. India has a brilliant record against England in Tests. In 16 encounters, India has three wins and a solitary loss, while the others were all drawn. Their most recent clash was at the D.Y. Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai in 2023. India marched to a massive 347-run triumph then. England’s last win against India came in 1995.
Red-ball fixtures are few and far between in the women’s game. England and Australia are the ecosystem’s most active participants. India has been an enthusiastic follower, with South Africa too slowly hopping on board. The costs of staging Tests make this a tier too high for everyone else. Even a board like New Zealand, one of the game’s old powers, has been vocal about its disinterest in the format for women.
So, how this Test, staged on one of the game’s grandest stages, slots into cricket’s rhetoric, and whether larger questions about the format’s relevance in the women’s game will be answered, are things to watch.
But this Lord’s Test will be what it has been fashioned to be: historic. It is another major cultural and societal barrier broken. With record audiences expected and two hurting sides looking to sign off from a challenging international summer on a high, it remains to be seen whether this spectacle can prove to be the catalyst the ecosystem’s red-ball ambitions are crying out for.
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Published on Jul 10, 2026