When I was drafting out the Kranti analysis, little did I realise that the UP Warriorz had dug themselves an absolute hole, going from 57 for 2 to 97 for 9. It takes a special effort to botch a game up this badly. Credit to the Gujarat Giants’ bowlers and bowling changes.
Read our analyses below!
😎 Kranti makes it ‘seam’ easy
Kranti Gaud, before tonight, had a rather interesting tournament. Her first three games saw her not complete her quota of overs and go for a few runs as well. From there, she finally bowled her full four overs but remained wicketless after four games.
To say she was under pressure is something only she can answer. But with a T20 World Cup later this year, every game becomes a lead-up to that big tournament. For a wicket-taker like Kranti, it was important to stack up some numbers in the wickets column.
Leading up to tonight, Kranti had picked just one solitary wicket in 15 overs across five games, going at an economy of 7.86. You could say she’d done decently to contain runs, but for a strike bowler like her, there’s always an expectation to pick wickets.
And that leads us to tonight’s game against Gujarat Giants. The conditions had something on offer—the ball moved both in the air and off the surface. Exactly where you’d expect to bring Kranti into the game.
Kranti’s strong suit is her ability to jag the ball back in and get slight movement in the air. Today was an interesting exhibition in knowing when to use her skillset and controlling her variations and accuracy.
She started her spell with an LBW appeal off a ball that jagged back into Beth Mooney from a good length, but it was given not out. She also jagged one back into Danni Wyatt, hitting her pads, though this was clearly sliding down the legside.
Come the second over, Kranti was as accurate as ever, giving nearly no room to Mooney to free her arms. Against Danni Wyatt, however, she missed her lines slightly—either bowling too wide or too straight. She rectified almost immediately, bowling the perfect wobble-seam delivery. But unlike her general tendency to jag it back in, this one held its line—possibly even moving away—to rattle Hodge’s stumps.
From then on, she mixed her grips beautifully, bowling wobbles and cross-seams in her next over to Anushka Sharma. The idea with the new ball on a pitch like this, especially when you want to mix things up and might not be controlling your swing perfectly, is to use the cross-seam to get variable bounce and have the ball potentially nip around.
Kranti realised the need of the hour and produced a cross-seaming delivery that caught Sharma’s edge and was pouched safely by Shweta Sehrawat.
Along with the variations, it was the accuracy with which Kranti delivered today that allowed her captain to trust her with four overs on the trot yet again. She finished a brilliant spell: 4 overs, 18 runs, 2 wickets. A spell laced with sharp accuracy that stifled the Giants—she bowled 12 dot balls, a solid 50%. That’s two overs worth of no runs being scored off her.
After five games of searching for form, Kranti Gaud delivered when it mattered. Accuracy, variations, and crucially—wickets. What’s important for her is to continue picking her game up with each game, which it seems she has been able to do until now!
🪇 UPW need more than just Ls
Still trying to wrap my head around how UP bottled that chase. But from the moment they lost Litchfield, it was always going to be a game of catch-up.
The biggest problem this season for the UP Warriorz has been their over-reliance on the 2 Ls- Meg Lanning & Phoebe Litchfield. About 50.2% of all runs that the team has scored this year have been contributed by just these 2 players. And if you add in Harleen Deol, she’s contributed another 16.7% of the team’s runs.
In essence, only 3 batters, and realistically only 2 batters, have consistently stepped up for the UP Warriorz. Therein lies their biggest fault this season, the inability for players to put their hand up and say, “I’ll get the job done tonight”.
To put into perspective how bad things are for the UP Warriorz, if you look at the other teams and their reliance on their top 2 run-scorers, it isn’t as skewed. This graph shows the percentage of runs being contributed by the top 2 run scorers this season for each side. It really gives perspective on the lack of support that Litchfield and Lanning have had.
Till the Indian players don’t step up, it is almost next to impossible to win games of cricket, especially if your overseas stars are not multi-faceted generational all-rounders!
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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