Why Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha has swapped football for cricket – The Athletic – The New York Times

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Gurinder Chadha’s cult 2002 sports film Bend It Like Beckham ends with Jesminder Bhamra’s white, Irish boyfriend and football coach Joe playing cricket with her father, who had previously been excluded from the sport after arriving in Britain. This is why he is initially unsupportive of Jess’ football career.
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It’s a resolution that pulls together harmoniously the film’s threads of family, national identity, acceptability and acceptance, community and belonging — reconciling relationships that were knottier an hour and a half earlier.
Almost 25 years on, British-Indian director Chadha has made her first foray into sports filmmaking since Bend It Like Beckham’s unprecedented success, having been approached by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to create a blockbuster film trailer to promote the ongoing series against India Women.
For the first time, England Women are playing India alongside the countries’ men and mixed disability teams. While the men are competing at Lord’s this week in the third Test of their summer, with the series locked at 1-1, India’s women have made history by clinching their own T20 series with one game still to play — their first such series win on English soil.
They will look to build on that success when the three-match one-day international series begins on Wednesday.
The trailer spotlights iconic moments from past encounters as well as the British-Indian cricket community across England, and riffs off some of the themes and scenes from Bend It Like Beckham.
Players Danni Wyatt-Hodge, Heather Knight and Lauren Filer, who all watched Chadha’s movie as children, make their acting debuts.
“They’re not really actors, but at the same time, they’re performers when it comes to being great sportswomen,” says Chadha. “My job was to direct them, to make them feel comfortable and not self-conscious. They all spoke about the effect ‘Bend It’ had on them growing up, and how they still watch it. It was about women in sport, basically — and even though it’s cricket, they recognise the power of that.
“In the film, I wanted to make sure women looked super-athletic, and that’s what I was also trying to do with the teaser. Shifting images of how people perceive women, particularly sportswomen, in our world is really important to me as a director.”
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The aim is to, in Chadha’s words, “lend the Bend It effect” to women’s cricket.
It is difficult to encapsulate the breadth of the Bend It effect, from its impact on British-South Asian girls who saw in lead character Jess their first sporting role-model to its part in normalising the ambitions of women and girls in football at a time when a scholarship to the United States’ college game was the only route to a professional career.
For thousands of women, the movie was their gateway into football. England internationals past and present, including Alex Greenwood, Leah Williamson and Rachel Daly, have spoken of its impact on them.
Domestic women’s cricket has grown significantly in the past few years, aided by the popularity of The Hundred, a shorter and simplified form of the game played each summer that was designed to attract newer audiences.
A March 2025 report from the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) noted there were 150 professional female cricketers in England, up from 24 in 2020, and that 320,000 people had been to watch a live women’s Hundred game in 2024 compared to 267,000 in the tournament’s first season three years earlier.
The average Hundred salary in 2021 was £8,000 but will have risen to £29,100 this year; the PCA noted the gap between top men’s and women’s salaries in the game, however, had increased. ECB statistics have shown growing numbers of women and girls’ cricket teams and improving attendances at England Women’s matches.
Both sports are moving into new eras following decades of neglect by the powers that be.
Cricket chiefs will likely have one eye on the popularity of the Lionesses, currently defending their European Championship title in Switzerland, and the Women’s Super League, which became fully professional in 2018 — 16 years after Bend It Like Beckham hit cinemas — and opened up a wider pathway for women to have a career as a professional footballer in England.
Chadha’s work, of course, is about more than events on the field and uses sport to examine evolving ideas of Britishness.
Back in 2002, she says, “the idea of making a film about football and girls was risible” and “everyone thought it was a joke, that it would never work and no one would be interested — especially in an Indian girl playing football. That was, like, a real joke”.
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Why did she persist?
“Because I believed in it. I thought that was the time. I thought the zeitgeist was changing. Soccer was more than just soccer and it had become a national sport. Taking something about football and the England team at the time and opening it up culturally and gender-wise, to me, felt like the right way to push all the right buttons in terms of what I wanted to say about Britain and what Britain looked like to me compared to what I saw on screen.
“At that time, Britain was changing.”
She mentions Norman Tebbit, the British Conservative Party politician who recently passed away but, in 1990, had suggested that those people living in England who support their native countries, including South Asian and Caribbean sides, when they face the English cricket team are not sufficiently integrated; the so-called ‘Tebbit test’ was a source of significant media coverage and debate.
“So sports and national identity were interlinked,” continues Chadha. “Now what I find brilliant about cricket is the fans, the followers — the England Barmy Army and the Indian Bharat Army — have a lot of fun at cricket games. They’re there to party, really, and support their teams. I think it’s a great way of expressing who you are, by following a sports team — but at the same time, it’s the coming together of England and India and two nations.
“What I see with cricket is that people celebrate the game as well as their own identities.”
Some of Chadha’s clearest childhood memories are of her father being “glued to the telly for days” whenever an India match was being shown. “No work would get done. My mum would be saying, ‘There’s no rice in the house! There’s no chapati flour! We need to go to the shops!’. And he would go, ‘Later! Later! Later!’.”
She recalls walking around Lord’s, the London cricket ground considered to be the spiritual home of the sport worldwide, while shooting the trailer to see a portrait of Bishan Singh Bedi, who was her father’s favourite cricketer. “I took a selfie with him, for old time’s sake,” she says. “Just walking around the grounds, there’s a lot of history for me. It’s a shame my father’s not around today, but I know he would be super-happy I was doing this.”
In 2022, more than 2,000 South Asian women volunteered to deliver cricket sessions via the ECB and Sport England’s Dream Big programme, part of a wider effort to open avenues for diverse communities at grassroots level. Partnership with faith institutions and community centres has also helped.
“In India, it’s massive as well among women,” adds Chadha, “because it’s more than just the sport. It’s important to stress that women are put on the same pedestal and I think that’s why a lot of women come out and support it. As long as the players are there and the talent’s there, there’s no holding women back.
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“Putting women on equal footing with the men’s game is the intention (of the trailer). That’s really what I wanted to do. And I think that’s what we’ve achieved. And who knows if there’s a cricket fan out there who’s got a great script in them?”.
Click here to read more cricket stories on The Athletic.
(Top photo: George Wood/Getty Images)
Katie Whyatt is a UK-based women’s football correspondent for The Athletic. She was previously the women’s football reporter for The Daily Telegraph, where she was the first full-time women’s football reporter on a national paper. Follow Katie on Twitter @KatieWhyatt

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