Jarrod Kimber and Shayan Ahmad Khan
Ellyse Perry delivered an over per match through the first six games. That number is important because she would take a six-wicket haul against Mumbai Indians later in the season. All it took for Royal Challengers Bangalore to break their no-trophy curse was for women’s cricket to get a league and for one of the greatest players ever to be on their team and take her career-best figures.
Being an RCB fan has been a world of hurt. This was a team where the fans instantly got on board, and they had to deal with Test lineups, Vijay Mallya shenanigans and Corey Anderson being a death bowler.
And it wasn’t like this season was progressing so well for the women’s team that their fans were preparing to celebrate. On March 10, RCB lost by just one run while chasing 182 against Delhi Capitals, despite Richa Ghosh’s 51 off 29 deliveries. This was a team who were zero and five against DC as well as MI before their second league game against MI. That is a really poor record against the two best sides across both seasons.
Their campaign started by defending five runs off the last ball against UP Warriorz, and ended with a low-scoring chase that went down to the last over. Their two key players, Sophie Devine and Renuka Singh, were far from their best.
That meant Perry had to stand up. She has done this before, with a broken leg, in a World Cup final no less. Weirdly, despite the fact that her ridiculous all-round achievements automatically put her in GOAT conversations, she had to work on her T20 game. Ben Sawyer talked about how she was challenged with being dropped. She had fallen behind as Mithali Raj did. A relic of another era. But this was the new Perry.
As for Richa Ghosh, who was Perry’s batting partner when RCB won, the talented wicketkeeper-batter played some of her best knocks when RCB were in trouble. Her partnership with Perry against MI came when they were 39 for 3. Her 62 off 37 against UPW in their first match was after coming in at 54 for 3. Against DC in that loss, she brought the equation down to 2 off 1 from 89 off 49 when she arrived.
A big part of RCB having a much better season this time was down to Smriti Mandhana’s return to form. She had a poor campaign in 2023, scoring just 149 runs in 8 innings. This time, she doubled that total and finished fourth on the top run-getters list. Her runs carried them through the hurdle of Heather Knight not playing and Sophie Devine’s form not showing.
She explained that her decision to skip the WBBL and play domestic cricket was planned for two reasons – to be able to identify domestic talent from first-hand experience and to get her own basics right.
S Meghana played a small but crucial role. Even though she was in and out of the side, her opening partnership with Mandhana helped set the tone in several games.
But the most fascinating aspect of RCB’s title-winning campaign was their spin quartet of Shreyanka Patil, Sophie Molineux, S Asha and Georgia Wareham – two leggies, an offie and a left-arm spinner. The fact that three of them could also bat made them a more well-rounded team.
When MI needed 20 runs in the last three overs of the Eliminator with Harmanpreet Kaur and Amelia Kerr in the middle, the win predictors were definitely not in RCB’s favor. But their spinners turned – pun intended – that game around.
Georgia Wareham is competitive. In the nets she was thinking about the next World Cup when bowling to Mandhana. She played a part with the bat in that one.
Shreyanka changed things by dismissing Harman in the 18th over. The 21-year-old showed promise in the inaugural edition of the WPL. She followed that up by being the highest wicket-taker in the Caribbean Premier League 2023 and making her T20I debut. The talent is pretty obvious.
But Shreyanka didn’t have a great start in this year’s WPL, picking up only two wickets in the first four matches at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. However, her tally of 11 wickets in the Delhi leg of the tournament meant that she won the Purple Cap, quite the in-season comeback.
In her own words, she is a different beast when there’s a little turn. In the final, she dismissed Meg Lanning and cleaned up the tail. She took her second four-wicket haul against DC in the season.
India Today did an exclusive interview with her coach, Arjun Dev. He talked about how confidence was her standout trait. And you can really see it in the way she bowls, fields and bats.
Smriti Mandhana talked about how RCB kept tracking Molineux’s progress because she was injured. Her selection made sense, because RCB used her as an all-phase bowling option and floated her around with the bat throughout the tournament. She started the tournament by defending 5 off the last ball in the opening match, and was pivotal in RCB’s final win. She dismissed Shafali Varma, Jemimah Rodrigues and Alice Capsey in the eighth over of the innings, and RCB never gave up the advantage after that.
Asha Sobhana grew up making balls out of paper, wrapping them with milk packets, and bats out of coconut tree bark. This is someone who had to make cricket happen. Then she got stuck in the domestic circuit for a decade, paid poorly and playing in sub-par conditions, the sort of thing you only do for love. She more than earned her moments, becoming the first Indian to take a fifer in the WPL. That wasn’t all – she also defended 12 runs in the last over of the Eliminator.
This is the team that broke the RCB curse. Vijay Mallya is no longer just in exile, he has been exorcised.
Fans who have lived through all the mismanagement, terrible signings, allergy to picking bowlers and everything else, finally have a win. And these fans really supported this team. The gender was irrelevant. The badge on the chest was everything. They earned this win as much as the players out on the field.
On March 10, when RCB fans had experienced another heartbreaking loss to add to an extensive collection, Richa couldn’t get them over the line against DC. A week later, she hit the winning runs. It wasn’t as great an innings as the one before. But to an RCB fan, it was by far the most important.
