Follow UsAfter finishing last in the inaugural edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL), the Gujarat Giants would have hoped for a strong start to the 2024 season to mark a new beginning. However, two games into the new season, the Giants once again find themselves at the bottom of the table.
This season, twice the Giants have batted first, and twice they’ve been let down by their batting: after scoring 126 in their first game against Mumbai Indians, they managed just 107 in the clash against Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) on Tuesday (February 27).
Toss-wise, the Giants have been a tad unlucky: this season, 4/5 matches have been won by the team bowling first, but GG have ended up batting first on both occasions. And they’ve found it tough to deal with the juice that’s present on the surface up-front, losing a total of 9 wickets in the first 12 overs of the innings.
Speaking post her side’s heavy defeat against RCB on Tuesday (February 27), GG skipper Beth Mooney admitted that bowling first has proven to be advantageous, but made it clear that her side have lost two in two not because of the toss, but because of their inability to adapt when they’ve batted.
“If I’m being blunt, toss could be used as an excuse for the team that’s batting first,” Mooney said at the press conference after the RCB game.
“Obviously the conditions are in favour of the bowlers if they do win the toss but I don’t think it’s so much that you can’t win a game batting first. In the first 6-10 overs, you’ve got to be disciplined - what your scoring options are, what shots are on.
“Perhaps we haven’t adapted as quickly when we’ve batted first. Moving forward, we’ve got to learn from this and work out how to bat first on these wickets.”
Despite two defeats in two, however, the skipper believes that there are not too many things going ‘wrong’ for the side at the moment.
“Not a whole lot is going wrong for us right now, to be frank,” Mooney said.
“It’s the nature of T20 cricket. You can be on the back end of some pretty good bowling and batting. But yes, tonight, we didn’t get enough runs on the board.”
Two games in, Mooney has already had two different opening partners. While Veda Krishnamurthy opened the batting against MI, it was Harleen Deol who rather surprisingly batted up top against RCB. Veda was in the XI against RCB, but she was sent in at No.4.
The swap didn’t work as Veda and Harleen, between them, combinedly scored 31 runs off 46 balls, but, at the press conference, Mooney explained the reasoning behind the shuffle.
“In the first game, it was about Veda trying to take on the role of an aggressor up top. She’s done that in the past in domestic cricket. Tonight, with RCB fielding four spinners, we thought she might be able to use her skill set a little better in the middle-order. Given that they had a very deep spin attack. That was the rationale there,” Mooney revealed.
With Gujarat’s batting having now misfired twice, Mooney admitted that South Africa’s Laura Wolvaardt will naturally come into the picture. However, the GG skipper made it clear that the franchise will not be making knee-jerk selections based on results.
“We’ve got Laura Wolvarrdt sitting on the bench. She’ll come into consideration at some point. Just to give us a bit more stability with the bat, most likely. But four days ago, when we hadn’t played a game, we felt what we picked was our best XI,” Mooney said.
“It’s not right to make snap decisions based on results. You’ve got to back the team you picked and boost the confidence of the players. Otherwise you will be chopping and changing all the time.”