Follow UsWhat was that one thing an Indian fan wanted before the start of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) 2025?
Good fielding? Okay, that’s still a work in progress.
New bowling treasures? There’s Kashvee Gautam and Kranti Goud.
How about some U-19 stars get their chance? Oh, Niki Prasad’s there.
Can we please get the OG Shafali Verma back?
That’s really the biggest wish if you’d asked any Indian fan. Shafali’s upside was so big that it was clear as daylight that there wasn’t anyone like her. If not her range, her aggressive batting at the top remained unparalleled.
On her best day, there wasn’t one person who could rival her.
But there was still that lingering aftertaste of bitterness for the Indian fans. The cry was consistently the same: Why can’t she take more responsibility? Why can’t she convert the good start into a substantial score?
The drop was like a writing on the wall, but the fact that it came out of the blue made it all too emotional for everyone. When you know the personal struggles with her dad, you will know how WPL 2025 was going to be the biggest-ever challenge. She wasn’t just wrestling for a place, she was trying to do that while still changing the mass opinion.
“I didn’t want to reveal because my father had a heart attack about two days before I got dropped from the team. I hid the news from him till he got better. He was in the hospital. I told him a week later,” said Shafali back then to Indian Express.
When you put all of this together, you see a picture that’s really out of place. But at the same time, you know that this artist is capable of selling art for a goldmine, or in Shafali’s case, selling seats for fun to watch her play.
What better than 30,000 people at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium on March 1?
In ways more than one, Shafali’s journey is sort of reminiscent of Neeraj Chopra, once known to be highly inconsistent, then to redeem himself as the golden boy of the country. Shafali has undergone a similar transformation; she’s gone from wearing her heart on her sleeve to becoming someone who understood her own game to the T.
“In the first two or three overs, I was trying to keep myself calm and keep talking to my partner. JJ [Jess Jonassen] and my conversations were going so well that we did not feel the pressure of the dot balls. We wanted to just see the ball and react and not be pre-determined,” Shafali said in the post-match presentation.
If you look at the finer print, you’ll notice how Shafali has transformed.
Calm, not feeling the pressure of dot balls, not predetermined—these are some of the things that you wouldn’t have associated with the 21-year-old a year back, but now, there’s almost a new persona—a sense of calmness that has taken over her soul.
That’s not the only thing new about Shafali. What she’s done over the last few months has already been noteworthy. But the difference now is that when you look at her innings, you wouldn’t necessarily just see her endlessly slog the ball towards the leg side; she’s opened up avenues previously unexplored.
Across the last two WPL seasons, it was noted that Shafali’s leg-side game was strong (337 runs off 176 balls). In particular, her game down the long-on region was another thing that was well known (27% of her WPL 2023, WPL 24 runs came in the long-on region).
So, teams planned and plotted her downfall.
But that’s where Shafali has gone into the shadows and worked her way up yet again to rule the roost. In this WPL season, the DC batter has shown a great level of consistency, with scores of 80*, 43 and 44 across her last three games. What has set her up differently from the other seasons is her choice of opening up the off-side, particularly the covers region.
In WPL 2025, the right-handed opener has made great use of the off-side. She has 106 runs in the off-side and 28% of her shots are in that covers region, a number drastically higher than her 16% previously.
It was on display, especially in the clash against RCB, where she took a liking to the covers region. Almost 30% of her runs on the night came in the covers region, with her strike rate reading a mighty 156.5 in the off-side, something that was previously in the 140s.
The fact that she could make room against Renuka Singh Thakur’s in-dippers, accessing the vacant off-side region, already shows that Shafali is at her A-game, or when she stepped down to the experience of Ekta Bisht, with a footworky six over covers. Shafali consistently being able to find the gaps against the spin was a noteworthy change.
Even Jess Jonassen, who saw her from the non-striker’s end, attributed Shafali’s game awareness, perhaps the first time we have mentioned the two terms together. All of this only augurs well for the national team, who perhaps dropped Shafali only because she might have lacked game awareness.
With a repertoire of shots, game awareness, and calmness, Shafali Verma might just be waiting to take her place back in the national team. There’s no denying that you can’t keep this Shafali out of the Indian side any longer.