Ellyse Perry six wicket haul led RCB
Aussie all-rounder finished her brilliant bowling showing with an unbeaten 40 to push her club into the playoffs.
There are very few things Ellyse Perry, the athlete, cannot do. One of the best fielders in the world, she is a menace for hitters trying to find the boundary rope. Her batting was always highly efficient, she has even grown to get better with new times. She is a footballer, in more than one meaning of the word. She has scored a goal for the Matildas at the Fifa Women’s World Cup and has also won Australia a cricket World Cup by deflecting the ball off her foot.
But it all started with the ball in hand. Not just in her international career, but all the way back as a kid. Ellyse Perry used to follow her brother Damien, three years older, wanting to accomplish whatever he was up to. She remembers their dad Mark teaching him how to bowl one night in the kitchen at home. “I was like ‘oh, I want to learn that’. Then it sort of extended to us going outside in the garden and dad basically showed us how to execute that sort of full action to bowl a cricket ball,” Perry said in an interview with the Royal Challengers Bangalore digital team last year.
The journey that started in that kitchen culminated to a historic night in Delhi when she delivered the best-ever spell in the brief history of WPL and her famous T20 career, picking up 6/15 in a breathtaking exhibition of stump-to-stump seam bowling that took RCB to the WPL playoffs. In that video interview, after being introduced as ‘by far, the G.O.A.T’ , Perry looks down to the floor and shakes her head with a bashful smile. She may not feel happy with the compliment, but on the basis of what 22,800-plus supporters observed at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on Tuesday night and for many years preceding up to it, it is a sentiment hard to argue against.
After holding Mumbai Indians to 113, Perry returned to oversee the run-chase alongside Richa Ghosh as RCB triumphed by 7 wickets.
Magical spell
It all started in the 9th over. After getting smashed for a four by temporary opener Sajana Sajeevan, Perry has gone 45 deliveries without taking up a wicket this season. When it rained though, it poured. Over the next 15 deliveries, she took up six wickets, all of them either LBW or bowled.
First up, Sajana’s off-stump was shaken by one that nipped back in from a fair length. This was around middle-of-the-stump height. Next ball, Harmanpreet Kaur, who played one of the best innings in the WPL in the last match, recognised that the game can be a wonderful leveller as she played on a delivery from about the fifth-stump line.
The hat-trick ball was also coming in at the stumps but Amelia Kerr kept it out. Not for long though, as the first ball of the next over, Kerr came down the pitch but was beaten on the inside edge by one that angled in. The not-out ruling was reviewed and the New Zealand allrounder found plumb in front.
Amanjot Kaur stepped in and hit a swagger-filled pull shot for four first ball, but Perry was having none of it. Another nip-backer from length shortly followed and Perry’s sequence of wickets read: W-W-0-W-4-W.
Not for the first time on the night, Perry would once again bounce back after being hit for a four to capture a wicket following ball. And once again, it was a heat-seeking missile targeting the top of off-stump as Pooja Vastrakar perished. Then, for her final act, she dispatched Nat Sciver-Brunt, trapped in front by another flawless delivery.
“The match was very important for us. For someone like her to step up and deliver today. I was at mid-off and I was thinking ‘wow’, it was a wonderful sight to watch,” RCB captain Smriti Mandhana said after the match.
“Some times it just goes your way, doesn’t it? Sometimes, I am just getting walloped all around the ground, then some days it is like this. I really enjoyed bowling tonight, been working on it a little bit. Felt like it was suitable conditions for me, it did a little bit off the wicket. It went my way,” Perry remarked casually.
Mandhana started the night on a combative note. ‘One run doesn’t define us,’ she remarked, referring to the last-ball loss against Delhi Capitals. RCB head coach Luke Williams addressed a gloomy dressing room that night, saying “I still think our best games are in front of us. I know that and I simply hope that we actually believe that.”
On a night when they just had to deliver, a very elite Perry delivered and how.
Brief scores: Mumbai Indians 113 all out in 19 overs (Sajana Sajeevan 30; Ellyse Perry 6/15) lost to Royal Challengers Bangalore 115/3 in 16 overs (Ellyse Perry 40 not out, Richa Ghosh 36 not out) by 7 wickets
