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Delhi Capitals (DC) head coach Jonathan Batty feels the batting unit was “a little bit sloppy” after getting thrashed by Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) in Match 4 of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) 2025 at the Kotambi Stadium in Vadodara on February 17 (Monday).
Asked to bat, the Capitals got off to a flying start in the powerplay. Thanks to Jemimah Rodrigues and Meg Lanning, DC were 55/1 at the end of six overs but lost the plot thereafter. DC could only add 86 runs and were bowled out for 141 in 19.3 overs. In response, RCB chased down the target with eight wickets and 22 deliveries remaining.
"Batting was probably more difficult at the start of the first innings, so I was pretty pleased coming out of the power play being 55 for 1. I'd say the first two or three overs, I thought RCB bowled really, really well and I thought Meg and Jemimah fought really, really hard to get us to a really good place at the end of the power play. And then we obviously probably made it a little bit too easy for them to take our wickets, we were a little bit sloppy, potentially with some of our execution,” said Batty.
"They got a nice partnership going after Shafali's early dismissal. I thought they actually played really positively as well and within sort of relatively low risk shots. And then obviously, all the batters who came in afterwards, most of them got reasonable starts, got into the teens, got into the 20s and just couldn't quite kick on. We probably needed another 50 or 60-run partnership somewhere within our batting unit to have got up to. I'm guessing probably 170 might have been a more realistic score to have even challenged and probably closer to 180 would have been probably par."
RCB’s opening batters Smriti Mandhana (81 off 47) and Danielle Wyatt-Hodge (42 off 33) put on 107 runs in 10.5 overs and made sure DC didn’t get any chance to make a comeback in the second innings. "141 I don't think was ever really going to be enough. With the dew coming in again, batting certainly gets easier as you go through the evening. So we knew we were going to have to take wickets and bowl them out and that probably puts your bowling unit under a bit of pressure as well. So yeah, not quite enough runs I think sums it up.
"I thought they (RCB bowlers) were on the money particularly early on. I thought they were well managed by the captain out there as well and they never really let us sort of get away from them even though we sort of threatened a couple of times towards the end of the power play. They kept plugging away. I think they executed their skills pretty well through that middle phase of the game as well."
Talking about Rodrigues, who hit 34 off 22 deliveries, Batty said: "I think Jemimah, over the last 12 months, and sort of leading to last year's tournament, made a really big shift in how positive she played and she was absolutely fantastic for us last year. I thought that innings today was very similar to how she played last year.
"Obviously, you would hope that she's not going to go in the second ball of the innings as well, so she was in very, very early. I thought her and Meg absorbed some pressure really nicely there before, then looking to expand when they felt a bit more comfortable but as I said before that she played really, really high tempo, relatively low risk, and it was really pleasing to see. It would have been nice, obviously, if she kicked on, but that's obviously the way cricket works sometimes. Sometimes it's not your evening."
