Free-spirited Shreyanka brings out her best when it matters the most
The offspinner turns up the heat in the climactic phase of the Women’s Premier League after having a cold start to the season
During the interzonal oneday tournament early this year, there was a day when South Zone captain Shreyanka Patil was having a poor day at the office. Her West counterpart, Smriti Mandhana, went up to her to console her and she broke down.
“I can be myself around Smriti,” Shreyanka remembered. “I wasn’t happy with my bowling. She reassured me and said, ‘it’s okay. March 17th, you’re going to do it for us.’”
True to word, Shreyanka would pick four wickets giving away a miserly 12 runs in 3.3 overs to help Royal Challengers Bangalore beat Delhi Capitals to lift its maiden Women’s Premier League title.
Cricket is a game filled with characters of every variety. You have the quiet geniuses on one end who believe their sport and skill can do the talking for them. Then there’s this other bunch – loud, proud, happy to show their swagger on the field as much as they do off it. Shreyanka belongs to this second kind.
After Richa Ghosh hit the winning runs, Shreyanka – along with a number of her teammates – was unstoppable. She was dancing constantly, coordinating group steps for the side; jumping on people, hugging people. It’s like no one was watching, no inhibitions, no limits. As the team posed by the champions’ photo op area, Shreyanka stood before it, dancing away to glory, like a little ballerina too immersed in her performance to have a thought for the world.
“I just wanted to be myself. I told Smriti, please don’t stop me today. I just want to be myself. And she was like all yours,” she said.
This was a marked difference to how her season began. The 21yearold got off to an underwhelming start in WPL season two. In her first match (against UP Warriorz), she conceded 32 runs without a wicket in three overs. Against Gujarat Giants, she conceded 13 runs in a single over bowled. Against an imposing Delhi Capitals, she gave away 40 runs in three overs, getting a wicket too while she gave away 15 runs in two overs for a wicket against Mumbai Indians.
“Shreyanka was the first one to come up and say, ‘I am not bowling well.’ She didn’t need me or anyone else to go to her with that... She came and asked, ‘I am not bowling well. What can I do?” She’ll come up with the solutions too. That’s her character,” Malolan Rangarajan, RCB’s assistant coach revealed after the Eliminator where the side beat Mumbai Indians for the second time.
Regaining her mojo
The week RCB’s performances improved coincided with Shreyanka regaining her mojo. The turning point was oddly a bad ball Meg Lanning dispatched to the boundary ropes in RCB’s onerun loss to DC in New Delhi.
“She knew she was one ball away from feeling good again and that happened with the Meg Lanning wicket,” Shreyanka’s coach Arjun Dev told The Hindu. “It was the ball before the wicket. It was a bad ball and went for four but how the ball came out of her hand felt good for her. She came back the next ball and things worked out after that.”
Incidentally, in the final, Shreyanka dismissed Lanning once more, a wicket that turned the face of the game.
Shreyanka came into that game having missed two matches due to an injury to her hand. The break was a blessing in disguise not just in helping her get some time off but also in working on what was going wrong with her technique, if anything. Stir crazy Shreyanka did not enjoy life on the sidelines.
“The first day I didn’t play, I went to everyone and said, “What am I supposed to do? How do I react? What should I do?” I am just standing there and doing nothing. It was a really bad feeling. Everyone made sure I was just sitting in a corner, because I am naughty and can get up to some monkey business. Even when I was jumping around in the middle of a match, one of them would sternly tell me to sit. Everything teaches you something and that’s how I see it,” she said.
Dev believes that it isn’t so much the person she dismissed as it was about her own sense of her technique that turned Shreyanka’s season for her.
“When the small things go your way, it feels good. We focus on how it’s coming out of the hands,” Dev explained.
“If she’s giving it enough revs, if she’s actually overspinning the ball — these are small technical things that we focus on. She knows these things, how to look for them and correct them. She understands her bowling enough to do most of it herself. It doesn’t even have to mean