The Australia’s women’s cricket team has done it again.

Overnight, they won yet another world title, defeating the hosts, England, on their own turf in the Women’s T20 World Cup. It is their 14th world title — a number so extraordinary it almost loses its meaning.

In any other sport, a team with that level of sustained dominance would be impossible to ignore.

Instead, this latest win has barely registered here in Australia, with many not even knowing we were playing, partly because of the FIFA World Cup. That frustration wasn’t just felt by cricket fans like myself. Australian fast bowler Darcie Brown voiced it during the tournament when she wrote on Instagram: “Any danger for the main media in Aus to actually mention that our girls are at the cricket World Cup?” A totally valid question.

Brown continued: “I understand soccer World Cup has taken over — as it should due to it being the world sport. However, why not put more Aussie spirit on and back the cricket in too. Or does no one actually care in Aus?”

Now, before anyone jumps to the obvious response: yes, we know the FIFA World Cup is a ‘bigger’ event. I played hockey, a big sport internationally but not huge in Australia. I never expected my hockey World Cup to have the same cut-through as other sports, so I understand how this works.

The trophy is theirs regardless, it just feels fewer people in Australia saw, or even knew, these women were being crowned champions.

Football, is one of, if not the biggest sporting event on the planet. It is always going to dominate TV, news headlines and social media feeds. This isn’t an argument against football — of course this attention is warranted. It’s an argument that the women’s T20 World Cup was never given a fair chance to stand on its own and I don’t think that would’ve been tolerated if it were the men.

The ICC knowingly scheduled the Women’s T20 World Cup during the FIFA World Cup. I appreciate that international cricket operates on an incredibly crowded calendar, and scheduling global tournaments isn’t simple. But I keep coming back to one question: would the ICC ever do this to the men’s tournament? I struggle to believe they would.

Can anyone seriously imagine the ICC scheduling a Men’s Cricket World Cup to overlap with the FIFA World Cup? It quite simply would not happen. There would be too much concern about television audiences, sponsorship, media attention and commercial value.

Yet that’s exactly what happened to the women’s game and it feels all too common. At some point, it stops feeling like unfortunate scheduling and starts feeling like an organisation ticking a box because it has to stage a tournament, rather than it wants to. There’s also something slightly uncomfortable in the way moments like this are treated more broadly. It can feel like the underlying message is be grateful the tournament is being played at all, and don’t ask too many questions about the coverage or the conditions around it. But that isn’t really how you grow a sport.

One of the most common criticisms levelled at women’s sport is that it doesn’t attract the same audiences or generate the same revenue, pointing to viewing figures as proof that the interest simply isn’t there.

I can’t even be bothered challenging that tired narrative anymore because, despite the hand women’s sport is so often dealt, they so often continue to prove people wrong.

But, even it we go down that narrative, how can we fairly judge the appetite for women’s sport if we are asking it to compete against the biggest sporting event in the world? How is it fair to use viewer metrics without actually giving it a chance to succeed to its full potential?

And if the answer is simply “well, people who care will watch anyway” — which they did, with this tournament drawing record crowds — then apply that same logic to the men.

Schedule a Men’s Cricket World Cup during the FIFA World Cup and see what happens. I suspect the backlash would be immediate with instant outrage. Questions would be asked about why cricket had been set up to lose the battle for attention before a ball had even been bowled.

Australia’s women’s cricket team has built one of the greatest dynasties in world sport. Fourteen world titles is an achievement that deserves celebration regardless of gender.

Instead, they have once again had one of their biggest moments overshadowed here in Australia by circumstances that, it seems, would never be imposed on the men’s game.

The trophy is theirs regardless, it just feels fewer people in Australia saw, or even knew, these women were being crowned champions.