Smriti Mandhana’s participation in The Hundred 2023 was productive in more ways than one. Not only did she win the competition with Southern Brave and get runs back under her belt after a forgettable start to her WPL career earlier that year, she was also successful in luring Luke Williams to Royal Challengers Bangalore.
Williams, an assistant coach under Charlotte Edwards at Brave, was more than just a familiar face for the last couple of years in the UK. Mandhana had known him previously on the franchise circuit in Australia, his highly decorated CV including coaching Adelaide Strikers to their maiden title in 2022 after two earlier runners-up finishes in 2019 and 2021.
“It played a massive role, yeah,” Mandhana said in a media interaction after RCB’s maiden WPL title win, shedding light on how the franchise roped in the Australian. “I’ve seen Luke for the last two years at the Hundred and have followed him a lot more at Adelaide Strikers as well. Tahlia McGrath, who I get along with during The Hundred, also spoke highly of Luke. So, when the RCB management asked me ‘who do you think for that role’ the first name that came to my mind was Luke. Of course Ben [Sawyer, RCB head coach in 2023] was great; nothing against him.
“But [my recommendation was] Luke because he’s really big on building a good culture, which is something the team needs in the first few seasons. If you’ve set the right precedent, it’s going to carry for a very long time and he’s done that excellently even in Adelaide. He was also very big on having really positive people around and having that positivity going [in the camp]. I saw him doing that at the Hundred as well, he never really got into anyone’s business, just did his work, he’d speak really positive stuff and [did] whatever was needed. So, I saw him very closely there and having known him for a couple of years did play a major role [in getting him on board].”
The duo got the ball rolling in the UK itself. Williams and Mandhana managed to sneak in some “secret meetings” away from the attention of their Brave head coach – also incharge of Mumbai Indians at the WPL – to discuss scouting and some potential targets for RCB’s December 2023 mini auction.
While the inaugural squads were assembled at short notice and handed over to the five captains, all of whom were participating in the 2023 T20 World Cup semifinal between India and eventual winners Australia, the subsequent season saw more involvement from them in planning and strategy. Despite a very unremarkable opening season, the RCB management backed their skipper – the costliest player in the league at INR 3.4 crore – and gave her a free hand in creating a vision for “her team” and executing it.
“There was a meeting just post the season last year with the management – just about what went wrong and what feedback they got. We had just come off a World Cup last year, just three days into it and I’m [an introverted] person to get along with the management [immediately]. So, it took a while for me to also understand them as well. That meeting was really, really important. We had a good chat of two-three hours in Mumbai, regarding a lot of things.
“The biggest takeaway of that conversation was that, you know, ‘this is your team and build the way you want to do it.” Secondly, they really wanted to set a good culture, happy and positive [one]. That was the big chat in terms of planning bit of how we want a team environment to be.
“Then the second bit of it was the auction planning. Hundred was where we started chalking down little names, started tracking few players like Sophie Molineux [PoTM in the WPL 2024 final] was injured so we had to track her, if she’s doing fine, what’s happening. Luke being from Australia really helped there.
“I was around – of course we were playing international cricket – but just about a call every month to quickly catch up. We were also just really big on playing like a team,one family. That was the biggest planning, to be fair. And then after that, it was just about going out there and [executing] and a little bit of luck maybe.”
After the team’s poor opening, “something deep within had changed” for Mandhana that she can’t yet quite put a finger on, but the captain wanted to leave nothing to chance going forward. Ahead of the inaugural draft of the WBBL 2023, the Maharashtra captain decided against enrolling and instead getting to the grind of the Indian domestic circuit – something she hadn’t quite properly participated in ever since her off-season T20 freelancing career kicked off.
That conscious decision to skip WBBL had duel motivations – to get to know the Indian domestic talent better as RCB captain, and as a pure batter a touch out of nick to get down to the basics of understanding Indian conditions better, having played all but two of their international assignments overseas since March 2021.
“That was part of the plan, as a player as well as a captain for me,” Mandhana revealed. “I’d not played domestic for 3-4 years. Sometimes when you’re not around but you hear the names you do not know what’s happening and even the videos aren’t [fair assessment]. We have great scouting [team] but just sometimes being there you really understand a player. Maybe two stops in the field and and you just get to know that he or she has that spark. So that was one reason, and secondly, for me, it was just getting down to it and trying to play the way I played. Sometimes, when you play a lot of international cricket, you forget a few things [domestically]. You need to keep doing those basics right.”
Planning led to the preparation stage, where in RCB conducted multiple camps for their Indian contingent, as well as domestic targets on their radar, between the two seasons to get them ready for the standard of cricket that was expected of them. These camps ranged from fitness to fielding to skills, varied from weeks to even a couple of months, and Mandhana kept watch with one-on-ones or a quick video call catch-up at regular intervals.
“Mostly every month we used to have 3-4 days of skills camps in the off-season in Bangalore. Plus, at the same time, for our India domestic players, RCB used to conduct fitness camps that went from 30-40 days,” and that really helped me,” said Asha Sobhana Joy, who became the first Indian to register a fifer in WPL history in RCB’s opening game of second edition after picking just five wickets overall last year.
“This certainly wouldn’t have been easy for any team to do, really, because these were not any random camps. These camps were of international standards with our RCB trainer which, as a domestic player in India, I had never experienced [before].”
Mandhana reckons those camps played a major role in raising confidence levels among the domestic talent – especially the uncapped retainees. Georgia Wareham, who switched sides from Gujarat Giants to RCB this time, concurs.
“Just the confidence with which they all bowl, and the way they back their ability which I think was really good,” Wareham said of the shared learnings on RCB’s spin desk. “In moments, the crowd here is nuts, so just their ability to sort of shut that down and just play is pretty good.
“It’s really cool to see how they go about it. As much as they learn things from us, I think, we’ve also learned off them a lot,” the Australian legspinner noted.
A big testament to that was the performances of the bowling group in both the knockout games. In the Eliminator, the spin trio of Shreyanka Patil, Sphie Molineux and Sobhana defended 20 off final 18 deliveries to beat the defending champions and put RCB through to the final, where a collective spin choke reduced Delhi Capitals from 64 without loss to 113 all out.
Molineux, who was adjudged Player of the Final for a splendid triple-wicket eighth over that triggered the infamous collapse, stated that open communication played a key role in their success.
“We made a really conscious decision a week or two weeks ago [at the start of the Delhi leg] that communication is going to be a really important thing for us, especially the spin group. We were playing on a different pitch every single night, so yeah we really did mention that to each other. As a group we were able to do that really well the last few games,” Molineux said.
“After every over she bowled in a match, she would come up to each of the spinners and give us advice on where to bowl and what was happening on the wicket,” corroborated Patil, who picked up both the Purple Cap (11 wickets) and Emerging Player of the Tournament awards.
“You don’t really get that from everyone, but she being a superstar, she’d come to all the spinners and tell us that ‘there’s something here on this wicket’, or ‘if you bowl here it will help you’ or something even like ‘this isn’t happening’. Those inputs really help you, especially in a shorter format like T20 where an over can change the game. Just hats off to her.”
At the heart of it, after all, was just good camaraderie and exemplary leadership to back up all that meticulous homework.
“This year, as a team, we got so much time to sit and talk. Last time, it was all [put together] in a hurry. This time, we had enough time. In Bangalore also, in pre-season camp, to get to know each other, have dinner, go out. The team vibe was there, that was the key aspect. We got proper 10 days where in all of us are sitting together, training together, going out together, discussing cricket together. That really helped actually. That’s where Smriti played a major role by getting the team together, bringing the players together. She was a genius in that regard as a captain,” Sobhana said glowingly of her team captain.
It may not have necessarily been flawless cricket every game that made Mandhana & Co. the champions as much as the culmination of lot of little things done right behind the scenes over the period of last year. As the RCB franchise’s 17-year trophy wait finally ended, the wild celebrations involving a video call from Virat Kohli continued well past midnight at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, and their title ‘Queens 2024′- what the winners’ placard read – felt deservingly appropriate.
