Lisa Sthalekar unconvinced on UPW’s decision to retire out Harleen Deol which led to a complete batting collapse.
When UP Warriorz (UPW) were 141 for 4 after 17 overs against Delhi Capitals, Harleen Deol was batting at a respectable pace. With seven fours, she was on 47 off 36 with a strike rate of 130.55. Alongside the uncapped and inexperienced Shweta Sehrawat, who was on 7 off 6, she was the set batter in the middle. After a brief argument in their dugout, UPW chose to retire Deol, which caused several people to take notice.
Deol had slowed down significantly, so UPW took the call. When she was on 28 off 18 and then 39 off 26, she was hitting at over 150, but as the final overs drew near, she was unable to produce the big hits, scoring just eight runs off her final 10 balls between the 15th and 17th overs. UPW made the decision to give her a call back at that point.
After head coach Abhishek Nayar emerged from the dugout and gestured for Deol to return in the hopes that the incoming batters would be able to find the boundaries in the final three overs, Deol’s expression of shock at being asked to retire out demonstrated how unexpected the decision was for the seasoned Indian batter.
“He (Nayar) turns to me and he goes, ‘I think it’s the time we need to potentially bring Harleen off.’ And I was like, ‘Ooh, okay, this isn’t a normal thing in the women’s game,'” UPW mentor Lisa Sthalekar said of how things unfolded in the dugout once Deol started slowing down. “And then I think another over came and she just wasn’t able to get that swing, that power that we needed to clear the boundaries. So then it was decided (to retire her out). And then he (Nayar) spoke, I think, to Meg (Lanning, the captain) and a couple of the coaches just quickly to make sure we were all on the same page. And then we pulled the trigger.”
Chloe Tryon, Sophie Ecclestone, and Deepti Sharma were the batters who came after Deol. Each of them has a higher strike rate and has hit more boundaries in Twenty20 Internationals than Deol, who has only hit one six in the format after facing 338 balls. In the WPL, Ecclestone and Deepti both struck sixes more often than Deol.
The choice to add a more forceful hitter had some merit, but there was some danger involved.
“The only thing I questioned was, I think, Meg got out, and I said, ‘If we pull her (Deol) the next over, then you’ve got two new batters (at the crease),'” Sthalekar said. “She’s kind of got used to the conditions. But I think we had about 40 (18) deliveries left. So it’s like, how are we going to maximise those deliveries? And we still felt with Chloe, with an Asha (Sobhana), with a Sophie, that we still had firepower. Like I said, sometimes these things work and we look like geniuses. And sometimes they don’t. And that’s why we love this game of cricket. It keeps us on our toes.”