We’re not the most PDA group, and we’re careful not to offend. We wouldn’t hold hands in the street or in the stands.
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“We’ve been in those countries and had partners come out and we’re on red alert.
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Lauren Winfield-Hill, who married her girlfriend Courtney (a former professional cricketer and now captain of rugby league team Leeds Rhinos) in March, remembers being hyper-vigilant on tour. Those differences in attitude from country to country are something that the England women’s team have discussed. And as international cricket is governed by English law, any abuse because of sexual orientation on the pitch falls under this stricture, whatever the local norms.
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He was sanctioned under the player code of conduct but, later in 2019, the ICC pulled all its anti-discrimination legislation into one anti-discrimination code which specifically prohibits a wide range of behaviour, including homophobia. Gabriel was fined 75 per cent of his match fee and given three demerit points for “personal abuse of a player”, which ultimately led to him being banned for four ODIs because of his previous disciplinary record. Just in recent years, South Africa’s Marizanne Kapp and Dane van Niekerk and New Zealand’s Amy Satterthwaite and Lea Tahuhu have married, while Australians Elyse Villani and Nicola Carey and Rachael Haynes and Leah Poulton pose happily together on the red carpet. The engagement of England’s Katherine Brunt and Nat Sciver, a relationship that began on the dressing-room balcony at Lord’s as the sun set on England’s World Cup win in 2017, was greeted with widespread happiness, but they weren’t the first cricketing couple in a branch of the game that has long quietly accepted same-sex relationships. Yet the rise and rise of the women’s game has shown that there is another path. All that is reflected in the fact that only one male international cricketer, Steven Davies, has ever come out while still playing. Chuck a knuckle ball of hyper-masculinity into the mix, an intense team environment and, traditionally, largely male commentary and spectators, and you create a place where it is difficult to be different, let alone gay. Cricket has always mirrored the society, the diverse societies, where it exists. That the game can swing so far between acceptance and condemnation is no real surprise. Not forgetting Pakistan’s home from home in recent years and the hosts of this year’s IPL, the UAE, where the maximum penalty for homosexuality is death, as it is in Pakistan. In Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, while male homosexuality is prohibited in Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Meanwhile, across large parts of the cricketing world, homosexuality is illegal. Its home for 2021? The Sydney Cricket Ground, that beautiful old green-roofed girl, home of Don Bradman’s highest first-class score, Steve Waugh’s scrambled 29th Test century and, since August, the Sydney Sixers LGBT fan group, formed to work with the club on inclusion issues. The long reach of Covid’s cruel fingers means that next year’s Sydney Gay Pride will shuffle and shimmer away from its familiar location on Oxford Street.
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First published in issue 38 of Wisden Cricket Monthly
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As part of Wisden Cricket Monthly’s series on cricket’s diversity problem, Tanya Aldred consideres why the number of openly gay male professional cricketers in England still stands at one, and looked to the women’s game for a more accepting environment.