MATCH STORIES
Follow UsJust a few days ago, Shreyanka Patil featured in a Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) social media video shot right after Ellyse Perry’s storm blew away Mumbai in their last league game. She was singing “Perry Perry Lady” with full emotions and expressions.
This tells you two things about Shreyanka: one, despite being an RCB player, the RCB fan inside her still lives and breathes, and two, she’s not shy about expressing those emotions in front of the camera.
Image credits - RCB Instagram
Last year, when the RCB picked Shreyanka, it was like a dream come true for the Bengaluru girl who practices her trade at the city’s NICE Academy. While her overall numbers from the first season don’t speak much about her ability, there were enough flashes of her brilliance for the RCB faithful to hype up the 21-year-old.
When she was selected for the Indian team for the T20 series against England and Australia, that hype swelled even further.
Combine all that with the fact that RCB fans have hardly ever got a local Bengaluru player in RCB (apart from Rahul Dravid and a few others) who’s big at the international level as well, and you would now understand why Shreyanka is the second most popular Indian in the RCB's Women's wing after Smriti Mandhana.
When the 2024 Women’s Premier League season began in Bengaluru, it was meant to be Shreyanka Patil’s biggest moment. She would finally get to play at her ‘home ground’ in front of thousands and thousands of RCB fans who would paint the blue and yellow Chinnaswamy red and black. Who would shout your name so loud that the roof might just come off.
All that happened and much more. I was there during RCB’s first game at the Chinnaswamy. The second loudest cheer of the day was reserved for the Bengaluru girl.
It was going to be a homecoming for the ages. But with great hype comes everything that is wrong with sports fandom.
Shreyanka Patil tanked hard in the Bengaluru leg of the tournament.
She bowled in four out of the five RCB bowling innings at the Chinnaswamy but completed only nine overs. A look at her bowling average, economy and strike rate in that leg is enough to tell you why she wasn’t given more.
The noise had gotten to her. The batting-friendly conditions had gotten to her. To this, add the fact that she’s a practitioner of cricket’s rubbish skill, which is almost non-existent in top-level men’s T20s. It was hard surviving, forget thriving, at her own home.
A look at her beehive from that leg will tell what was happening with her. The cluster of wide deliveries in the blue and yellow zone (to the lefty batter's side) reflects how she tried to keep the ball away from the batter’s reach. The number of blue deliveries in that same region will tell you she wasn’t successful at all in doing that.
What followed was brutal trolling. People questioned her everywhere, from being called ‘overrated’ to ‘just a social media Queen’. The same RCB fans who were chanting 'Shreyanka Shreyanka' a few days ago had suddenly lost belief in their local girl.
Except for a fielding effort that went viral, nothing was going in her favour. That’s when the change of venue came to her aid - something that wasn’t available in WPL’s inaugural season.
In her first game at the Kotla against the Delhi Capitals, she picked up four wickets that included the likes of Meg Lanning, Jemimah Rodrigues, Alice Capsey, and Jess Jonassen - who easily make up 75% of all of DC’s batting strength.
The batters were not only holing out in the deep against her, but she used a new angle from around the wicket to get Lanning plumb, and then she bowled a yorker to pack up Rodrigues, who attempted a sweep on that delivery. If not for a bottling job by the majority of their batting order, she would have won her team that game with such a performance and not ended up with an excruciating one-run loss.
That pattern of her targeting the stumps was also visible in the next two games, as you can see in the beehive. She targeted 21 of her 54 deliveries at the stumps on the sluggish Kotla deck and picked up a wicket every seventh ball from that line. The number of wide deliveries reduced as well when you compare it with her Bengaluru beehive.
The result is in front of you. In the last game and in the eliminator against Mumbai Indians (MI), she picked up one and two wickets each. The latter came at a really crucial time when MI only needed 20 off 18 deliveries.
Richa Ghosh missed Harmanpreet Kaur’s stumping on her first delivery. The next four balls were all singles, bowled either on a nagging good length or angling into the stumps to deny Amelia Kerr and Harmanpreet any room to manufacture a shot.
The last ball of the over was tossed up to Harmanpreet, angling into her. The bait was given. Just like it was given in MI’s first game in the WPL. The result was no different. The skipper had holed out to the fielder in the deep, and there was no Sajana show to finish the game for MI.
The wonder kid who had suddenly gone to zero from being a hero was back to being a hero again. Sophie Molineux and Asha Sobhana followed her brilliant four-run over with a special performance of their own in the last 12 balls to take RCB home.
At just 21, Shreyanka has seen the best and the worst of the cricket world. What if her ‘home’ didn’t work for her? What if people trolled her?
All she needed was some heart to find her a new ‘home’. Despite her diminutive frame, that’s one thing she always packs a lot of.
That hearty performance ensured RCB reached the finals for the first time in WPL history. She survived and thrived amidst a lack of form and many heartbreaking losses.
Shreyanka Patil might have started just as an RCB fan, but here she was, taking a team led by a number 18 to the last frontier before ultimate glory. This is something even a crazy RCB fan like her wouldn’t have dreamed of. How’s that for a story now?
