Siren 08: T20 World Cup final, Australian Sports Museum, AFLW Roundup & more
A Women in Sport Collective
Our voices are hoarse from cheering and our cheeks are aching from smiling so hard but what a final! A crowd of 86,174 people piled into the MCG on International Women’s Day to watch Australia take on India in the T20 World Cup grand final. The atmosphere inside the ground was something special. It was exciting to be a part of! A moment not soon forgotten.
While the remarkable crowd is not a new world record for women’s sport, it is a new record for a women’s sporting event in Australia and the biggest crowd ever for a women’s cricket match. It also demonstrated what serious investment can do for women’s sport.
As Lindsay Gibbs wrote about in her newsletter Power Plays, (a must read for all sports fans) Cricket Australia has been building towards this final for some time. And they’ve been investing in women’s cricket, too. The Australian women’s cricket team are the highest paid female athletes in team sports in Australia. The players can devote themselves full time to their craft. And as Sunday’s performance demonstrates—yes, hello Alyssa Healy and Beth Mooney—it certainly works. So, how about some more serious investment in women’s sport!
In more good news, the coverage of women’s sport in mainstream media passed 30% on Sunday. It’s a number we sure could get used to. But as Siren’s own Kasey Symons wrote, we shouldn’t have to wait for an event like the T20 World Cup for women’s sport to get the coverage it deserves. And 30% isn’t 50%.
In this issue
There’s more World Cup goodness as Kasey Symons reviews and reflects on the World Cup. Kirby Fenwick stopped by the newly relaunched—and renamed—Australian Sports Museum and discovered the museum now boasts equal coverage of women’s and men’s sport and it wasn’t difficult to do!
Danielle Warby has put together a list of women’s sport books you should add to your reading list right away. And Gemma Bastiani is back with the The Roundup and the AFLW heads towards the business end of the season. Plus we have The Results for you.
Siren has reached a little milestone of its own, with our 8th newsletter hitting your inbox last week marking two months of Siren. We wanted to reflect on what we’ve managed to do in that time, with some pretty limited resources but also with your wonderful and generous support. Here’s to many more newsletters, as we continue on our mission to elevate women’s voices, alongside other diverse and marginalised voices to deliver feminist content that challenges the status quo of sport media.
The T20 Women’s World Cup Final – A Successful Roar for Women’s Sport
By Kasey Symons
After two weeks of an exhilarating tournament, and months of campaigning to #FillTheMCG and celebrate women in sport, the 2020 ICC T20 Women’s World Cup drew to a spectacular close at the MCG in front of a record breaking 86,174 strong crowd.
Girls to the front: the new Australian Sports Museum makes equality a priority
By Kirby Fenwick
The Original Nine
The recently redeveloped, relaunched—and renamed—Australian Sports Museum features new exhibitions and exciting new technology alongside the stories of women. The museum now boasts parity in the representation of women and men.
Women in sport books from Australia
By Danielle Warby
Danielle Warby is on a mission to make a definitive list of women in sports books from Australia. Some criteria: the books need to be about Australian women in sport. They need to be written or at least co-authored by a woman.
The Roundup: Round Five
By Gemma Bastiani
Rhiannon Watt celebrates her first goal in AFLW. Image: Megan Brewer
We’re officially into the second half of the 2020 AFLW season and every game can have a huge impact on ladder positioning and, therefore, finals. With a minimum margin of three goals, plenty of teams are putting the foot down in order to maintain their percentage and their best chance of making it to the finals.
Quickfire results from all recent WNBL and Super W matches.
Our team has done a heap of writing in the past week across various platforms. Kirby Fenwick discusses the value of AFLW beyond simple dollars and cents for The Guardian, Kate O’Halloran touches on the impact of an historic T20 World Cup final for the ABC, Kasey Symons was interviewed about a broadcaster’s choice to relegate the T20 World Cup final to a secondary channel on The Age, and Gemma Bastiani delved into the statistical development of AFLW scoring for Play On Radio.
There are also new episodes of Kick Like A Girl, This AFL Life and The Play On Review for your listening pleasure.
It’s hard not to just shout about the Australian women’s cricket team from the rooftops after Sunday (we will keep shouting about them, don’t worry!) but there was of course more women’s sports and women in sport news this week.
But first, here are a few great pieces about the T20 World Cup that we’d like to share. Megan Maurice wrote about how this tournament is more than a game. Five Australians were named in the Team of The Tournament, adding to the accolades for the world champions. Our very own Kate O’Halloran was also a special guest on Burn It All Down’s special T20 World Cup Hot Take with the amazing Shireen Ahmed. Take a listen!
Congratulations to the UC Capitals who went back to back and took out the WNBL Championship last week.
This year marks the 50 year anniversary of The Original Nine, the nine women led by Billie Jean King that formed the WTA to challenge gender inequality in tennis. A moment that women in sport will be forever grateful for. The WNBA posted this great little video on the record 11 women who are working in NBA in coaching roles for International Women’s Day. Crazy to think 11 is a record, hopefully we see more and soon!
ESPN’s Sarah Spain interviewed our friend Lindsay Gibbs in the latest episode of her podcast, ‘That’s What She Said’. Kate Cornish writes on the ‘Sam Kerr effect’ for Beyond90.
The Change Our Game Community Sport Symposium was held on Friday March 6, featuring speeches by the Change Our Game ambassadors and panels with key people from the sports industry. If you couldn’t make it, the video of the event is here and is a great resource.
In Canada, the first all-female broadcast for an NHL game aired on Sportsnet for International Women’s Day. CBC Sports also recently committed to gender-balanced coverage across all its platforms. It was also great to see an all women panel on ABC’s Offsiders on Sunday especially when discussing important issues like the conversation around the Herald Sun recently announcing their closure of comments on women’s sport coverage.
The This Girl Can Campaign launched last week and is giving voice to a lot of women in sport stories. We love this one with Rosy Interrigi who has given golf a go and come to love it.
We’d also like to send congratulations to AFL photographer Michael Willson who became the first ever photographer to win The Golden Quill for his iconic shot of Tayla Harris. We love this photo and what it stands for and it deserves all the prizes.
Look, we’re going all in on cricket this week and we’re not sorry. But this tweet from Brittany Carter who got young Neve a cardboard cut out of her heroine Meg Lanning is the sweetest thing! Well done, Brittany! And we’re looking forward to seeing Neve play for Australia one day!
Runner up
This was so hard this week! There is so much goodness! But we’re pretty obsessed with Sophie Molineux’s dance moves. This was pretty hard to beat. Thanks Neroli Meadows for capturing this moment!
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