The home losses for RCB raise tactical questions

Quickly leaving the joyous gathering, Smriti Mandhana raced close to the RCB dugout to connect with her coaching team. Instead of risking an underarm throw from a distance, Richa Ghosh had just jogged to shatter the stumps with her bare hands, channeling her inner MS Dhoni. With the scores equal, UP Warriorz’s last batter was run out, but they required their number eleven to score the game’s final run or runs off the last legal pitch. And there it was: the Women’s Premier League’s inaugural Super Over.

Jon Lewis led the UPW huddle on the other side of the ropes because some urgent decisions needed to be made. Despite not showing up tonight, Chinelle Henry was given the first dibs because of her huge hitting on a parallel pitch two nights ago, and the Caribbean all-rounder was the first to be padded up. Shortly later, Grace Harris joined her. Sophie Ecclestone, who had just made a crucial appearance, was trying to collect herself in the dugout so that she might try again if a wicket fell in the Super Over.

When Warriorz needed two in two, Ecclestone was undoubtedly “fuming” after throwing Kranti Goud in the deep end with a single off the penultimate ball. Only after the two points were secured would she realize that she had single-handedly saved triumph from the jaws of certain defeat. It was RCB’s game to lose, which they did, as UPW needed 42 off the final 18 deliveries with two wickets remaining.

After losing the dangerous Henry in the 17th over, Ecclestone was batting on 3 off 8 balls and fending with the tail. However, Georgia Wareham ended up delivering two slot balls, and the English all-rounder hit 12 of those runs in just a handful of those deliveries by lofting the second straight back over the bowler’s head and sweeping the first one over the square leg boundary. Once again, UPW found themselves in a dangerous position as Saima Thakor was run out in the 19th over. With one wicket remaining, the equation was reduced to 18 off the final six.

Mandhana chose Renuka Thakur (3-0-19-2) for the final over over Ellyse Perry (2-0-10-1) in what may have been the first of two significant tactical errors that determined the game’s fate. At first, it didn’t appear to be that awful because Thakur was able to avoid striking Ecclestone with the initial ball. Ecclestone casually smashed RCB’s chances out of the park with two more on-side sixes and a brilliant cut over short-third for four after she proceeded to falter in her lengths three times in a row. Two needed off as many. With the ball in the make-or-break over, a rabid crowd of 28,000 was startled into silence and left wondering if Perry would have been a better option.

It’s unclear if Perry had another over left in her given that the Australian all-rounder had only just returned to bowling duties that evening after suffering a hip injury in the previous Women’s Ashes at home. In addition to avoiding the question, RCB rookie Sneh Rana, who was speaking at the press conference after the game, strongly defended the team’s decision to give Thakur the final over after Ecclestone hit 17 to trigger a Super Over.

Renuka is among the world’s top bowlers, in my opinion. The same conclusion was reached by our team: you should select your greatest bowler. Renuka has consistently given her best effort. I can’t really blame her for that. Because T20 cricket has its share of ups and downs. The guy in question has also claimed five wickets. As a result, the team believed she was the most qualified candidate at the time,” Rana stated following the Super-Over loss.

It appeared that Thakur was no longer ‘the best in the industry’ to be trusted with the Super Over, though, at that point. Kim Garth was given the ball by RCB, and she performed well to keep the majority of balls out of the Warriorz big-hitters’ arc by giving up just eight runs. Perhaps RCB realized that Thakur was having trouble with rhythm after that nerve-racking last over of regulation time. However,

Mandhana was also the batsman that evening, and that was the second tactical blunder made by RCB.

It may have been difficult to resist the lure of a favorable matchup between a left-arm spinner and a left-handed batter because RCB accurately anticipated that Ecclestone was poised to bowl the Super Over as well. But the choice backfired because Mandhana said that she felt like she had “gone into a shell tonight” and perhaps felt a little desperate to take the initiative and save her team from the mess they had created for themselves. Throughout the over, the RCB captain found it difficult to maintain any kind of connection, as the team only managed four singles. Perry, who earlier struck her WPL career-high 90 off 56 balls, watched from the sidelines as she padded up and awaited her turn to enter.

Perry’s bowling duty may have been limited for the time being, but denying her batting opportunities in this scorching form when RCB only needed to score eight runs could prove to be a costly error after the round-robin stage is over. However, Thakur, the team’s pace leader, may be the only reason for the inability to defend 17 off the final over, but it calls into question RCB’s death-bowling tactics. An ordinary opponent has stolen points from them in their homecoming as defending champions for the second time in as many games.

Only in their most recent match, against the Mumbai Indians, did she shift gears and sprint away thanks to a favorable matchup with Amanjot Kaur in the 19th over. The club has struggled to finish close games, with death-overs strategy and execution proving to be their weaknesses despite a Perry-inspired comeback in both of the season’s games where RCB batted first. The fact that consecutive home losses have not yet affected their standing in the standings is merely a false sense of security, as minor errors might quickly cause them to fall out of the top three in a season as open as WPL 2025 has been so far.