The experience of watching a game at the Chinnaswamy Stadium is usually an exhilarating one. Even if the match doesn’t involve Royal Challengers Bangalore or the Indian team, you expect a sizeable crowd. And if one of the aforementioned sides is playing, the emotions are set to hit fever pitch. That is what exactly happened on a pleasant evening in Bengaluru. A little more than 26000 fans crammed in at the Chinnaswamy to watch their favourite team, RCB, defeat UP Warriorz in the Women’s Premier League.
The RCB-UP game wasn’t just about the cacophony of sounds made by the fans as there was plenty of action too. For starters, there was a breathtaking batting display by Smriti Mandhana, the RCB skipper, and to an extent Ellyse Perry. The fireworks from Mandhana’s willow included pulls, lofted drives over extra cover, alongside clearing her front leg to thwack a few through the on-side. And those fireworks were duly matched by the roars of the crowd.
That was in brief about Mandhana’s batting. The game also had its share of bloopers. Mandhana was dropped twice, once each by Chamari Athapaththu and Sophie Ecclestone. Both of them turned out to be tame attempts. Along with the fielding errors, there was something else to observe. When Mandhana came out all guns blazing, UP seemed to have pressed the panic button. A case in point was the 15th over bowled by Athapaththu. Despite not having a fielder at deep square leg, she bowled a few down the leg-side as Mandhana collected a succession of boundaries.
Oh! Then you throw in a bit of controversy to make the game a complete package. The confusion was related to the DRS; the technology which has been in the news for not exactly the right reasons in the recent past. During UP’s innings, Athapaththu, the left-hander, was rapped on the pads while she tried a sweep off Georgia Wareham. For a moment it felt as if the bowler had employed the leg-spinner from over the wicket. The on-field umpire’s decision was not out but RCB decided to place their belief in the review.
The Hawkeye then suggested the ball to be pitching just in line with the leg-stump, heading straight, and eventually knocking over the middle-stump. On expected lines, the UP camp had something to say about the dismissal. “You watch the ball with the naked eye, and you think it might pitch in line, just maybe,” Jon Lewis, the UP coach, said after the game.
“Then you look at the ball rotating, and well, it’s rotating like a legspinner. There are not many legspinners that go towards that [other] side. It was a fascinating dismissal and a massive turning point for us in that game,” he added.
So, basically, the WPL game had virtually everything – Thrill-a-minute batting, poor fielding, questionable strategies, electric atmosphere and a touch of controversy. In a nutshell, a quintessential T20 game that gave the passionate fans their money’s worth.