At no point in the early overs, after Gujarat Giants won the toss and sent Mumbai Indians in to bat, did the fresh wicket deployed at the Brabourne Stadium give an indication of it being a 200-plus track. The last two league games of WPL 2025 were both played on a parallel wicket on consecutive nights at the start of this week, and had been high-scoring affairs won by sides batting first. But there was some tackiness to the Eliminator track, as Giants head coach Michael Klinger later alluded to, and Ash Gardner, after calling correctly at toss, decided to make the first use of it.
For the better part of the PowerPlay it went per the Giants' script. The pitch behaved sluggishly, and the ball wouldn't come on to the bat as nicely as the batters would've liked. Giants deployed two different spinners in the PowerPlay, for three overs between them, and had done a reasonably good job of containing the second-best opening pair in the competition's history. After finally finding her groove at the business end of the tournament, Hayley Matthews seemed to be struggling to find her timing and appeared to struggle due to the slowness of the track against the spinners. All this after Danielle Gibson had prolonged Yastika Bhatia's misery with a second-ball strike on her WPL debut.
The 37/1 MI had after the first-six was only improved by their MVP Nat Sciver-Brunt, who took full toll of the short and slot balls Gibson dished out in the seventh over, hacking them for easy fours to settle in and take her side to 50/1 by the end of the over. The strategic timeout then gave both the batters a little breather and a chance to exchange words of reassurance that unlocked a game-changing partnership to nullify tricky conditions on offer. The key? Playing late and impeccable footwork.
"Today she probably wanted to get off to a bit of a quick start, but it was good that she stayed there and didn't get very worked up at the wicket because we know how powerful she is." Sciver-Brunt said of her partner in the 133-run stand. "We had the timeout and then she did time it a bit better after that. [I was] just reassuring her that you only need to time it, you don't need to absolutely whack it. It's very hard to remember sometimes, when you open the batting, to get yourself to a good start and take advantage of the powerplay.
"She spoke to me about the movement of the ball and I could see that it probably wasn't coming on as well, because we played the other day and it came on a bit nicer. But I felt like it was a little bit sloppy [today]. So I guess that played into our hands with the backfoot shots that are both mine and Hayley's strengths, I guess. As soon as we worked that out, it probably unlocked us a little bit more. So yeah, working together to get to that point was important."
Matthews came out of that two-and-a-half minute break with a hat-trick of boundaries to welcome Priya Mishra into the attack, and it signaled the change of intent. The first two boundaries were off short ones from the leggie straight up and duly punished, while the third was a juicy low-full toss that Matthews absolutely pounced on.
When Meghna Singh came into the attack, a fielding gaffe helped Sciver-Burnt to a boundary early on in the over that went for 13. Gardner brought herself on to help apply the breaks, but another sloppy fielding effort at backward point let the ball run to the fence and added four bonus runs to Matthews' tally. Tanuja Kanwar had only conceded five singles in her over then before dishing out an absolute freebie for a last ball that the West Indies captain wasn't going to let go. She hung back and whacked the pull straight over midwicket to raise a 36-ball fifty after trudging along at 17 off 22 balls at the said time-out.
Amidst all these boundary hits, four of GG's best bowlers were completely thrown off their tracks, one after the other, partly because they were let down by ordinary fielding. The field placements went awry rather quickly, because Giants had by now switched to a very defensive run-saving mode than attacking-to-take-wickets one. MI had taken 42 balls – i.e. 7 overs before the time-out break – to their first fifty, and only 24 to the next. What was worse for the Giants was that Sciver-Brunt – who had quickly moved on to 30 at a strike-rate of almost 200 – was yet to fully join the party.
Gibson, the only bowler to have found a breakthrough thus far, returned in the 15th with slower balls and more change-ups. The cutter first up had Sciver-Brunt taking a wild, almost ugly swipe at it across the line and missing it entirely to get rapped on the back pad. But she quickly course-corrected. Gibson erred on the shorter side for the next two deliveries, Sciver-Brunt rocked back in her crease and pulled them both over the midwicket ropes – raising her fifth half-century of the season off 29 balls with the first of those maximums. She then brought up the century of the second-wicket partnership with the next maximum.
Giants' drooping shoulders were hard to miss at this point, and to make matters worse, skipper Gardner uncharacteristically spilled a regulation catch in the deep. Matthews nearly gifted her wicket the next ball too, taking off for a non-existent single and almost giving up on it, but yet another GG fumble allowed her to stick around and cause more damage. And that she did with aplomb. She danced down the track to get to the pitch of a slower one that Mishra floated up on leg stump, and launched it over the long-on fence. The legspinner responded by slowing it down further and throwing it wide of off, but the Caribbean opener was quick to read it as she planted her front foot, hit with the turn and timed the inside-out over cover with absolute perfection. Seeing the batter advance once again, Mishra pulled her length back only for Mathews to still miscue it off the inside half to the long-on ropes.
Kashvee Gautam eventually provided the wicket just as she returned, but it only set the stage for Harmanpreet Kaur to now capitalise on an early lifeline and vandalise the listless GG attack further. The MI captain exploded with a 12-ball cameo of 36 that eventually propelled MI to 213. However, even if aided by all those reprieves along the way, it was the calculated attack of an experienced pair that all but knocked the wind out of Giants' sails with their damaging 133-run partnership. The stand is now Mumbai's best-ever for any wicket across the three seasons. Giants had ended the round-robin phase as the best-scoring side in the middle-overs at 8.51. In a do-or-die game in the race to the finale, two of MI's best gave them a taste of their own medicine by scoring 122 runs at 13.55 in that phase, only for it to be further accentuated by their skipper's pyrotechnics in the slog-overs.
After consuming 20 dots in the PowerPlay to get their eye in, Mumbai's batters played only 11 and 8 dots respectively in the following two phases. As MI looted 89 runs off the last six overs, it became increasingly evident what lack of big-match experience can do to an outfit, never mind the number of individual stars or match-winners in its ranks.
The Giants lost the plot in fielding and also in the bowling department. Their attack comprised of relatively inexperienced, if not all uncapped Indians. It was depleted further with the pre-toss injury to Deandra Dottin, who was their second-best wicket-taker, and partnership-breaker, of the league stages. That, however, should take no credit away from the tact and adaptation shown by Matthews and Sciver-Brunt. The duo capitalised on most of those errors from the bowling and deflated the opposition in what they perceived as helpful conditions to bowl first.
Despite some fight in patches with the bat, aided by the onset of dew in the second half, Giants eventually saw the writing on the wall after losing all three of their highest run-scorers inside the PowerPlay in a tall chase. And with that, their most successful WPL campaign came to a close just the way it started in Vadodara – ruing missed opportunities after the early promise to upset the apple cart.
Klinger accepted that the 20 runs they left in the field and the 20 extra above par that MI managed with their peerless power-hitting were ultimately the difference. The GG coach doffed his hat to the second-wicket pair that took the game away from GG even before their chase could get underway.
"They're two high-quality players," The Australian said after the 47-run loss in the Eliminator. "We knew coming into this game that their top-four or five are strong and we probably had to break through that top-order as early as we could, but credit to both of them, they played really well. I don't think Sciver-Brunt gave us a chance. Sometimes you've just got to give credit to the opposition and they played really well today.
"We did have very specific plans for her [Sciver-Brunt], but you can have that for the best players in the world, women or men, and if they're playing at their best, that's why they're the best players in the world, they can overcome whatever plans you've had. I'd say we executed reasonably well with the ball. We probably gave away some runs in the field tonight. We weren't at our best. I thought it was probably about a 40-run swing. I think we were probably minus 20 and they were plus 20.
"When players are going, I suppose, as well as that partnership, you're probably looking to find a way to give them a single and not give them boundaries, but they manipulated the field really well. Both the two players used the crease well. They walked across the crease and came at the bowlers well, so it makes it very difficult for the bowlers to be really consistent. As I said, sometimes you've just got to say, well done to the opposition, and I think tonight's one of those nights."
Rest assured, Meg Lanning & Co. would have taken copious notes tonight.
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