In the end, we nearly witnessed two centuries in the same match of the WPL, but Nat Sciver-Brunt’s century was enough to ensure that the Mumbai Indians were able to defeat the Royal Challengers Bengaluru, but not before getting a run for their money!
Read our analyses below 😀
💯 Deserving Sciver-Brunt smashes WPL’s maiden century
In typical Mumbai Indians fashion, it was once again Nat Sciver-Brunt who produced a masterclass in T20 batting. Today, however, was history—Brunt went on to score the first century in WPL history across all seasons.
It’s baffling how consistent Brunt is in this format and the remarkable ease with which she scores runs. Her last five innings read: 70, 65, 15, 65*, 100*. She isn’t just a good player with incredible skill; she’s a batter who manipulates fields and almost bends reality with the way she sets up her innings when in form.
With Sciver-Brunt, there’s only so much you can do as a bowling or fielding side. She’s good all around the wicket, excellent with strike rotation, and doesn’t particularly struggle against any bowling type in the WPL, averaging 30-plus against every matchup barring leg-spin. Even there, she makes up for it by striking at 165.
With how many times she’s taken a start and gone on to score big, it got me wondering: what can teams expect if they don’t dismiss her before a score of 20? So naturally, I looked at every time Brunt has crossed 20 in WPL history. The numbers are baffling, to say the least.
For starters, Brunt has the most 20-plus scores in WPL history, 24 times in 35 innings. That’s two out of every three innings she plays.
But here’s the showstopper: every time she’s crossed 20, Brunt averages 82.4 with a strike rate of 150. To put that into perspective, only Ellyse Perry has a better average, marginally higher at 83.1 with a strike rate of 135.5 for the same filters. Among 18 batters who’ve scored 20 or more at least 10 times in the WPL, Brunt has the second-best average.
From there, you look at the fifties and hundreds column to realise she has twelve scores of 50-plus when she crosses 20. A conversion rate of exactly 50%. Meg Lanning is the only other batter with a higher conversion rate, doing it 11 times in 21 innings. But in terms of doing it more times, Brunt takes the cake.
Perhaps one of the biggest things is Brunt’s willingness to keep going. The other distinction she possesses and a skill often overlooked is her ability to carry her bat through to the end of the innings. Out of her 24 such innings, she’s remained not out 9 times, which is 38%, the third-highest among these 18 batters.
So not only does Brunt find a way to score all these runs and bat long, but she also becomes the anchoring point around whom Mumbai Indians’ batters can rally and take the innings to completion, especially because she’s the first one to walk in when a wicket falls.
After looking at all these numbers and seeing how she’s been doing this for multiple seasons, it feels almost fitting that it was Sciver-Brunt who scored the first century in WPL history. A truly classy player, playing a knock of the highest pedigree.
👻 Richa Ghosh spooked the sh*t out of Mumbai, almost
You are the Mumbai Indians. The side with the best all-rounders in world cricket. A franchise with multiple WPL titles. You managed a total of 199. You’ve got the opposition 8 wickets down for a score of just 129, at the end of the 17th over. Surely, you can’t bottle this game, right? Right?
Well, you nearly did. Owing to a freak of nature, of course, but you nearly did.
Richa Ghosh walked in at number 6 with RCB in dire straits at 31 for 4 in the 5th over. This isn’t the first time she’s walked into such pressure, and it clearly isn’t going to be the last. Off the 31 innings she’s played in the WPL, predominantly batting at 5 or 6, she’s walked in with the score being under 50 seven times. Thrice, she’s crossed 25, scoring 28 once, remaining not out once and today, where she scored 90 off just 50 deliveries.
Even more than halfway into her innings, Richa was going at a run-a-ball, batting on 29 off 29 deliveries. It was a game that was more or less over in reality, and it felt like she was just batting out there to take the game deep and improve RCB’s net run rate, but that changed in the 16th over, when she cracked 3 back-to-back fours off Amelia Kerr.
The acceleration had begun. Shortly after, Ghosh took down Amanjot in a three-hit repeat, but this time with all shots taking the ball over the ropes. The 19th over saw her go from 55 to 74 in a span of 4 deliveries, and suddenly, Mumbai Indians’ captain Harmanpreet Kaur was not as levelled as she’d seemed to be throughout the game.
Ghosh continued her assault into the last over, as she smacked 16 off the first 4 balls and although out of reach now, things got a lot closer than expected for the Mumbai Indians.
She’d taken RCB from 31 for 4 to 184 for 9 and more impressively scored her last 61 runs in just 21 deliveries! In an innings that was choked by 18 dot balls that in a 50-ball-knock would bring down strike rate significantly, Ghosh’s explosive hitting was decorated with 10 fours and 6 sixes, accounting for 84% of all runs she scored tonight.
Surely, the world will take notice once again, and the hug she received from Harmanpreet at the end of the game felt more like that of an Indian captain who knew that India has a special beast in Ghosh, one who, if she keeps going in this fashion, is going to win India many, many games of cricket in the future.
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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