SEASON REVIEW
Follow Us“Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm or the gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.”
The UP Warriorz won four but lost four games as well in the league stages of the first edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL). They still made the playoffs. Ask their coach, Jon Lewis, about their last season; his assessment would also be that it was a mixed season.
They lacked pacers in their squad last year, as they did this year. They stuck to spin like a toddler sticks to its mother. Then, some individuals rose and put up performances worthy of their name.
Alyssa Healy, Grace Harris, Tahlia McGrath, Sophie Ecclestone and Deepti Sharma’s brilliance was just enough to take them to the eliminator, where the Mumbai Indians mauled them into a shade of yellow I can't mention because it won't pass the edit.
They rose above their own chaotic cocktail of problems, clung to their 'star' performers, and climbed to the top three.
This season, the team was largely the same, and the problems were largely the same, but this time, there was a fault in their 'stars'. It was a fault that began on that fateful day when this team was assembled for the first time. It combined with underperforming seniors and immensely buttery fingers to restrict them to just three wins in eight games.
The ladder had become a pit for them in the space of one season.
The problems began for the UP Warriorz at the auction table itself this year when they failed to pick up a proper replacement for Shabnim Ismail, who they let go before the auction. Moreover, Lauren Bell, the only other specialist overseas pacer in their side, withdrew from the season, and they replaced her with a batter, Chamari Athapaththu.
That glaring lacuna of a paceless bowling attack was addressed many times by skipper Healy, and maybe she was at fault as well, as Saima Thakor wasn’t trusted with the ball enough. Later in the tournament, she showed how the UPW management made an error by underusing her.
After going for 23 runs in two overs in her maiden WPL outing, she wasn’t picked for the next two games. When she was finally picked in UPW’s fourth game, she just played as a specialist fielder. The story was the same in the next game. In the remaining three, she picked up three wickets at an average of 22.6, which included a viral heated interaction with Shafali Verma, after which Saima uprooted her stumps and ran around her defeated victim like a tigress celebrating a kill.
This showed a very clear pattern - not only were the UPW lacking pacers, but they were also poor at managing the talent they already had.
The mismanagement of resources wasn’t just limited to their weaker suit in the bowling department. The chaos had seeped into their strength as well, as their spinners bowled the most overs (126.2) but still had the third-worst bowling average and strike rate despite Sophie Ecclestone and Deepti Sharma being amongst the top two wicket-takers in the tournament.
The issue was with their third spinner, as Rajeshwari Gayakwad averaged 39.5 with an economy of 8.8 this season. That’s where they missed a trick by not playing the extremely talented Parshavi Chopra, who had picked up three wickets in four games during last year’s WPL on the batting havens of Mumbai. With the pitches gripping quite a bit this year on both venues, the prodigious leggie would have been a handful to face.
All these resource management issues indicate that the ‘head’ of the team wasn’t in sync with what its body needed at that moment. Or maybe the ‘head’ was just busy Healy-ing from its own misery.
You don’t pay big bucks and pick Healy to be the 14th-highest run-getter in the tournament. You don’t make her the captain of your new team to average 21.87 and strike at just 117.5, opening the innings. Sadly for the UPW, that’s exactly where she is now after a below-par season with the bat.
It’s not like she hasn’t got starts. Five double-digit scores, out of which four are 25+, tell you that she began well, but the fun ended for her much before what she or her team would have desired. Additionally, as the side’s designated wicketkeeper, she only grabbed 50% of catches and the stumpings that came her way.
The troubles of having an underperforming skipper were exacerbated this season for the UPW even further when their top performer from the last season, Tahlia McGrath, arrived with her batting form claimed by Air India’s world-class baggage management.
McGrath, the third-highest run scorer last season with 302 runs in just eight innings, scored less than 10 percent of her runs from the last season. 27 runs in four innings at an average of 6.75 is all she could muster.
Now, add to the fact that she averages 83 with the ball, and you would question why she even got the four games she played.
UPW’s misery is highlighted even more when you realise, “Wait a minute, where’s the burger lady? Did she even play this season?”
Grace Harris scored 230 runs at an average of 57.5 and a strike rate of 165.5 last season. This time, she majorly batted at four, as UPW had a strategy of front-loading with all their key batters (Healy, McGrath, and Harris all in top four), and she scored 42 runs less despite playing three more innings.
The issue was again mismanagement.
Harris worked brilliantly as a finisher at five last season, striking at 151.3 from that position. So, why change something that has worked for you before? Why tinker with an out-and-out match-winner with a skillset as rare as the Kohinoor?
It’s understandable that the UPW were concerned about the lack of experience of their Indian players. Kiran Navgire, Shweta Sehrawat, Poonam Khemnar, etc, aren’t proven performers at the international level yet.
But what batting Harris at four did was that it clubbed all the experience at the top and left the lower-order Indian batters to fend for themselves. It’s like a school assigning extra classes for the toppers despite it being the backbenchers who need the extra support.
Why would you repeat the same mistake that Royal Challengers Bangalore’s men’s side made by stacking up their top-order with Chris Gayle, Virat Kohli and AB de Villiers? Haven’t you seen generations of IPL fans crying about this very issue?
And don’t even get me started on their fielding. Or wait. Forget me. When the new purple cap holder Sophie Ecclestone was asked to surmise her spell against the Giants, she said, “Obviously not an ideal finish. I wish my team would catch the ball sometime.”
Keep aside Ecclestone’s frustrated jibe and the selective amnesia of her not remembering dropping a catch herself for a minute ( (spoiler alert - she did). The UPW dropped 15 of the 27 catches that came their way. That means that nearly 36% of all their catches kissed the grass because the UPW hands were too slippery to catch them.
Jon Lewis mentioned in a press conference that the lack of experience playing under the lights for Indian domestic players was a key reason behind this. Moreover, the ball is hit with much more force at this level than in domestic cricket. Hence, fielding was always going to be challenging.
But when your team drops that many catches, there’s no way you can expect to be amongst the top teams of a tournament as competitive and ruthless as the WPL.
Lewis himself acknowledged in an exclusive interview with Cricket.com before the season began that he and his team “will have to hit the ground running”, “put in place a good strategy”, and “play well and play well fast” as it’s “very hard to catch up from behind.”
Hindsight is just cruel. Isn’t it?
However, it’s also true more often than not.
UPW didn’t mend the obvious flaws they had in their squad last year. Their skipper failed to perform herself and then manage a side of underperforming overseas players. They dropped any chance they got of getting to the top three because they couldn’t catch a ball even if they had fielded with baseball gloves.
If not for the individual brilliance of Deepti Sharma, who is currently the second-highest wicket-taker and highest run-scorer, they would have been in a deeper quagmire.
UP Warriorz’ chaos was never a ladder. It was, is, and always will be a pit.
They tried to climb it again this year as they clung to the individual brilliance of their overseas picks who failed them this once. That fall just broke them.
When the fog of war lifts, and the defeated Warriorz take a long, hard look at themselves and their squad, one can only hope that they realise that “chaos is a ladder” sounds good only in TV shows and as article openers.
It’s the boring clarity in vision and execution that will bring them out of this pit of their own making.
