Gautami Naik reaps rewards after an arduous road as she curbed her aggressive instincts to play a memorable innings against GG.
Gautami Naik finds her share of glory after long and bumpy road.
Every WPL 2026 match has featured a different batting hero for Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB), including Nadine de Klerk, Grace Harris, Radha Yadav, and Smriti Mandhana. On Monday, it was an unexpected name that saved them from difficulty. Three games into her WPL debut, Gautami Naik became the first uncapped Indian to score a fifty in the league by playing a measured innings while RCB was two down in the opening two overs.
You wondered why Naik played the pick-up shot over deep square-leg when, for the most part, she had been going at about a-run-a-ball. She had the big hits, after all; in the Maharashtra Premier League, where they open together for Ratnagiri Jets, she had impressed Mandhana with her tremendous hits.
She scored 31 off ten balls with three sixes and three fours against Solapur Smashers and 70 off 46 balls in a chase of 160 against Raigad Royals during the 2025 season. She finished with 73 in 55 balls from No. 4 on Monday.
Her long-time coach, Avinash Shinde, who has worked with Naik for more than ten years and has also mentored players like Kiran Navgire and Poonam Khemnar, was watching from Pune. Naik’s match awareness was more appealing to him than the runs, and he wasn’t considering who we were.
Naik had to control her hitting impulses on a Vadodara pitch where she acknowledged that making shots was difficult. Her innings was accented by a string of powerful blows that kept the scoreboard moving. She stood tall to punch through additional cover, waited well on length balls to find the gaps through covers, and wasn’t scared to go aerial, swiping cleanly over midwicket or lofting over-pitched shots back over the bowler.
Shinde was upset but not totally shocked when RCB bought Naik for INR 10 lakh at the WPL auction because she had impressed them during the tryouts. However, she was also called by the Mumbai Indians before to the trials last year, but she was ill at the time. She received a comforting message from Shinde after scoring just nine runs in her second game for RCB this season.
“The team that has won the WPL before is backing her, and she’s made it to the XI. It is a big thing. I just asked her to earn Smriti’s trust.”
As she signed off with the Player-of-the-Match award, Naik dedicated it to those who had brought her to this stage. “This is for Sir [Shinde] and my family,” she said. “It’s because of them I have achieved this. They have taken so much effort for me.”