When the Queen of the Queendom descended in Delhi

Six wickets in a four-over spell plus 40 runs that included the shot that took her team to the top 3. All that in just a single game that Royal Challengers Bangalore needed to win to qualify for the eliminator without depending on other results. 

When a player puts on a performance like that in a cricket game, you won’t even dare lift an eyelid if they don’t score or pick a wicket for the next ten games. Forget raising a finger. 

So, when a player follows that performance with another "lone wolf fighting against the whole pack" kind of display, that also in a knockout for a team like RCB, you just let yourself bask in her greatness. And when that bonafide great is Ellyse Perry, who has more individual achievements than many full member nations, you have only one thing you can do. 

You bend your knee, look up at the towering figure in front of you, and say with as much reverence you can muster - “What a Queen!”

That’s what Ellyse Perry is. She is no longer just the spicy Perry Perry mixture that RCB like to sprinkle all over their game. She is the Queen who claimed her Queendom at Qila Kotla, against the defending champions, beating them twice in two games almost single-handedly. 

23/3 

Smriti Mandhana, Sophie Devine and Disha Kasat were back in the pavilion after RCB chose to bat first. 

The team with the biggest fan following in the WPL were looking at the exit door, which was already half opened by a smiling Harmanpreet Kaur. But Perry said, “Not today!” and carried RCB’s entire batting on her shoulders. 

It was largely a consolidation effort from then on. Perry kept rotating the strike and ensured that the occasional boundary kept coming because the run rate kept trickling below the 6 runs/over mark. 

From the other end, Richa Ghosh was tightly bound by some brilliant strategising by Harmanpreet and bowling by Shabnim Ismail, who kept sending thunderbolts from over the wicket into the right-hander with a packed off-side field and a long leg side boundary. 

Perry got a four, and Ghosh got a six in the eight over against Saika Ishaque, and it felt like this duo would repeat their partnership from the last game against the same opposition. Alas, the pressure Ismail built from one end showed up in Ghosh’s holing out in the tenth over, as she was lured into a hitting big straight six that ended up in the Nat Sciver-Brunt’s hands. RCB were four down. 

That’s where Perry’s clutch temperament made its entry, as she navigated the next three overs along with Sophie Molineux and then blasted off Pooja Vastrakar for a massive six on a short ball in the 13th over. 

However, Molineux wasn’t making things easy for her. Her 11(18) put more pressure on Perry to score, and it took great skills from the Australian allrounder to keep batting at a similar tempo despite what was happening at the other end. 

Until Perry was out there, RCB still believed. 

Along with Georgia Wareham, she got 45 runs in the last four overs. Most spectacular of those were the two boundaries she hit in the 17th over against Ismail. Not only Perry made room against the quickest bowler in women’s cricket unperturbed, but she also hit her straight down the ground for a boundary. Very few in the world can do that to Ismail. 

In the end, Perry had 66(50) in RCB’s 135(120) and an orange cap over her head. That’s almost half the team runs alone in a knockout game against the defending champions RCB hadn’t defeated until two days ago in the WPL. Even then, it was Perry who wrote Mumbai Indian’s obituary. 

When you also bring in the fact that she cleaned up Yastika Bhatia, MI’s third-highest run scorer, with the ball, you know where the belief RCB showed in the field today was emanating from. 

In two games again this MI, she has scored 106 runs in 88 balls at a strike rate of 120 and picked up seven wickets for just 44 runs in eight overs. 

That performance is not just clutch. That’s greatness. That’s absolute Queen behaviour in a sport where even the greatest batters of all time fail more than they succeed. 

Despite that and the respect she gets from her team, you’ll always find her putting her body on the line at mid-wicket. Today, she not only saved boundaries but ran and jumped like a Cheetah to stop doubles. 

How can a team not be inspired when they see someone who has achieved all that is there to achieve in the sport many times over, still doing the grunt work most cricketers hate? How can a team stop believing when Ellyse Perry still believes? 

In the end, Shreyanka Patil, Molineux and Asha Sobhana had enough belief instilled in them to take RCB home and to their first-ever WPL final. 

This will be the fourth time RCB has reached the finals of a competition they are a part of. The eternal sunshine of the Ee Saala Cup Namde promise finally is just one game away from lighting up every RCBian's life, and it’s that woman - the Perry Perry lady, who’s at the forefront of it all - whether it be the viral reels life or the real one. 

In front of 24,000+ human beings at the Kotla, Ellyse Perry showed that she’s just the queen of cricket, and this is her QUEENDOM!