A rather odd fixture that. Delhi Capitals emerge victorious. The game was so weird that I lost all mood to analyse something except small bits of basics going wrong for both sides, in fact.
Batting
For starters, the pitch was sluggish in some weird way. Maybe it stayed a tad low, maybe the ball did not come on well post the powerplay. The curator spoke about playing straight as much as possible, and at least the RCB batters decided to do everything but meet the ball with a full, vertical bat face.
There were dot balls in RCB’s innings, lots of them. RCB played 54 dot balls, 9 overs worth of no runs; 45% of an innings where nothing came off the bat. Contrast that to Delhi’s 35.1%. They also played stupidly cross-batted shots, on a pitch that stayed low from time-to-time.
Mandhana’s knock was actually crucial, but she got herself out trying to accelerate at what seemed like the correct time to do it, in all honesty. At 62 for 1 in the 10th over with a small partnership brewing, Smriti was perfectly in her right to start taking off. Unfortunately, it did not pan out.
To RCB’s misfortune, the wickets of Gautami, Voll, and Ghosh all fell in quick succession as well. One tried to overdo it, the other played a horrible shot, and one was brilliantly caught by Laura Wolvaardt, her second brilliant catch on the offside for the night.
And honestly, it just kept on happening. Bad shots, good fielding, and everything went against RCB as they were skittled out for 109 in exactly 20 overs.
On the flip side, the Capitals actually had a worse powerplay than RCB, but owing to a lack of scoreboard pressure and RCB’s mediocre work in the field, it was never really going to be a game.
It also helped them that Jemimah Rodrigues and Laura Wolvaardt, two dynamic players who are also sponges, were out there to absorb the pressure. Jemi also had a couple of reprieves, which added to the eventual comfort in chasing down the total.
Fielding
We’d once received a comment on our YouTube, attacking us for our bias against Smriti’s captaincy. But today’s game reiterates my belief that Smriti is far from aware of a lot of tiny things on the field. Cases in point:
- Not having a slip. For god’s sake, you’re defending 110 with two good swing bowlers, one who gets a minimum of 2 wickets per game and the other who’ll be growing a forest with her dot balls. And you don’t persist with a slip?
- Identifying your best fielders. With the plan set, it was clear that the backward point region would be a hotspot in the powerplay. Smriti had Sayali Satghare there. Not to berate Satghare, but in a side that has Radha Yadav and Arundhati Reddy, why not have one of them there? Or even a Grace Harris with absolute buckets for hands, who was stationed at mid-on for Lauren Bell bowling predominantly outside off-stump back-of-a-length lines. Eventually, Satghare dropped a crucial chance early on, and Jemi was dropped multiple times.
Perhaps I am too harsh on Smriti, but that’s because she’s experienced enough and quite possibly the next Indian captain. These are some basics you HAVE to get right.
Jemimah too made these mistakes, especially not starting with a slip or giving Kapp the first over. You do not try to fix what isn’t broken.
At the end of the day, it was about catches not taken and one big partnership.
Data from Women’s T20 Batting App using Himanish Ganjoo’s T20 cricket BBB database up until October 2025, Arnav Jain’s fielding toolkit, Cricmetric, Cricket By JB’s WPL analyses & the Broadcast.
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