Football and Netball World Cups, Ashes and Solheim Cup highlight huge year in women's sport with record crowds and viewing figures; Luis Rubiales incident, pay disputes and ICEC report into cricket show work still must be done to achieve equality
Sunday 31 December 2023 13:06, UK
World Cup glory ultimately eluded England's footballers, cricketers and netballers in 2023 but they came ever so close in another highly successful year for women's sport.
Mary Earps' 69th-minute penalty save from Jenni Hermoso in the Football World Cup final - after which she bellowed an understandable two-word expletive - kept England in their game with Spain.
Earps ensured England remained just the 1-0 down with 21 minutes of normal time remaining; the Lionesses' hopes of backing up their Euros glory from a year earlier still very much intact.
The goalkeeper's stop mattered little in the end, however, as Spain, through captain Olga Carmona's first-half strike, clinched their maiden World Cup title and denied England the same achievement.
Jubilation soon turned to consternation, though, as Spanish FA president Luis Rubiales planted an unsolicited kiss on Hermoso's lips prior to the trophy lift, triggering international outrage.
The unsavoury incident - which led to all 23 members of Spain's World Cup-winning squad, plus a further 58 players, suggesting they would not feature for La Roja again while Rubiales remained in situ - highlighted that for all the progress made in women's sport there is still work to be done to drive out sexism and achieve equality.
Joey Barton's comments on female pundits showed the same.
Earps fought on this front, too, supporting fans in their petition to have a replica of her Nike-manufactured England World Cup goalkeeper kit made available for sale.
The sportswear giant buckled and produced the jerseys, which sold out almost as quickly as it took Earps to yell "f*** off" after her penalty save against Spain.
While indiscretions off the field marred the World Cup, they should not detract from what was a superb spectacle.
The largest tournament in the competition's history - 32 teams for the first time - provide ample engrossing storylines, including Morocco reaching the last 16 and Jamaica doing likewise after needing a Crowdfunding page to finance their trip to the Antipodes.
Viewers were gripped to games - the BBC reporting a peak audience of 12 million viewers for the England vs Spain final - while match attendances in person averaged 30,911, up from 21,756 in France at the 2019 World Cup, a tournament which had been won by USA.
USA were dumped out in the last 16 in 2023, losing to Sweden on penalties, as their hopes of a third successive World Cup title were dashed, and there was also despair for America's golfers at a record-breaking Solheim Cup in Spain as Team Europe retained their trophy with a gripping 14-14 draw.
This year's Solheim Cup was the most watched edition on Sky Sports with a peak audience of 734,000 witnessing Sunday's singles, during which home favourite Carlota Ciganda converted the decisive putt from tap-in range as she ended her week with an unblemished 4-0 record.
Europe had rallied from 4-0 down after the opening-morning foursomes, with highlights of the week in Andalusia including Emily Kristine Pedersen's hole-in-one and Caroline Hedwall's four birdies and one eagle across her final six holes on the Sunday to secure a crucial point against Ally Ewing.
Ireland's Leona Maguire made a splash, too, with three points from five, while Europe made a literal splash as they celebrated their trophy retention by leaping into a swimming pool.
We never got to find out how England's netballers and cricketers would have celebrated a success of that magnitude, with the former beaten by Australia after reaching their first World Cup final and the latter eliminated in the semi-finals of their World Cup by hosts South Africa.
The Vitality Roses went unbeaten at the Netball World Cup until the final, defeating Malawi, Scotland and Barbados in the first pool phase, Tonga, Fiji and Australia in the second and New Zealand in the semi-finals.
England's league win against Australia was their first over the Diamonds in World Cups but that could not be replicated in the final as they lost 61-45 to the now 12-time champions.
For England's cricketers, there was little time to dwell on the World Cup semi-final exit in February with a group of their players soon jetting off to India for the inaugural, and lucrative, Women's Premier League, the female equivalent of the long-established men's Indian Premier League.
The competition is a landscape-shifter for the women's game, offering regal sums never seen before, with England's Nat Sciver-Brunt purchased by Mumbai Indians for £320,000 and India's Smriti Mandhana bought by Royal Challengers Bangalore for a leading £340,000.
After guiding Mumbai to glory, Sciver-Brunt then hoped to help England to victory in the multi-format Women's Ashes for the first time since 2014. She tried her best, with a Test fifty and back-to-back ODI hundreds, but the Southern Stars retained the trophy by dint of an 8-8 draw.
Still, after 12-4 drubbings in the previous two Ashes series, that marked real progress for England, who defeated Australia in both the T20 and ODI legs to prove their opponents were not the unbeatable force they have often seemed over recent years while hoovering up Word Cup and Ashes wins.
Figures released by the England and Wales Cricket Board showed 110,000 fans attended the Women's Ashes in total and that 5.3m watched live on television - but we were also given a stark reminder that despite fan engagement booming, there are still strides to be made.
A report from the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) found the sport in England and Wales is "routine with sexism and misogyny".
Incremental steps have been taken with England men's and women's match fees now equalised in international cricket after the ICEC report discovered women were paid 25 per cent of men's fees for white-ball games and 15 per cent for Tests.
Financial issues are nothing new in women's sport, with the pay dispute between Netball Australia and the Australian Netball Players Association only just settled. Former skipper Kathryn Harby-Williams said some Australia players had been forced to sleep in the cars during the stand-off.
There should be no concealing that further progress is required but we should also celebrate what has been achieved in women's sport in 2023.
We saw a record 58,498 crowd for a women's rugby match as England hosted France at Twickenham and a record attendance for any women's sporting event as over 92,000 watched the University of Nebraska's volleyball game against Omaha.
We saw Katie Taylor avenge her boxing defeat to Chantelle Cameron and perhaps set up a trilogy. We saw Simone Biles become the most decorated gymnast of all time. We saw Coco Gauff fulfil her promise and become a Grand Slam tennis champion for the first time.
The journey for women's sport has not been smooth and the road ahead will feature further bumps but it continues to grow exponentially.
And if you don't believe that, Mary Earps has two words for you.
