Dominant T20 sides all claim they have found their balance and intend to be on top of the world with momentum. But very few ever truly do. Royal Challengers Bangalore’s perfect record so far in this WPL season, winning every game (4/4), at the top of the standings after the first leg, feels more like an experiment that went off perfectly than just being on a roll. The irony is that for a franchise that has long been described as heavy on batting but light on bowling, Royal Challengers Bangalore is currently the team with the best bowling unit in the league.
When the First Over Decides Tone
Bell made her mark on the competition from the opening round of the season, and she did so with a great deal of conviction. Forced to open for the first time, Amelia Kerr received movement from each end as well as probing length and eventually took her first wicket of the season. The opening spell was not about how many wickets were taken, but it was a statement of intent that RCB will set the pace and not follow others.
What followed was repetition, not regression. Meg Lanning, Sophie Devine, Laura Wolvaardt, Lizelle Lee, and Shafali Verma, elite batswomen, all found themselves fighting for their lives as opposed to dictating terms. Bell’s greatest quality has been her unwillingness to complicate things. She swings the ball late, keeps her length tight, and uses geometry. The more the conditions have offered some movement, the greater her discipline will be oppressive. The powerplay is no longer a launching pad but an examination.
Swing Is Only Half the Weapon
Missing the point is to say Bell only impacts the game when she swings on her own. While Bell has added a largely underappreciated dimension to her play with her size, her bounce has become a major factor on many of the surfaces in Navi Mumbai, where Bell can create steep angles of elevation for lift and cause the batters to be uncomfortable as they try to hit the line.
Grace Harris (who was half-relieved and half-incredulous) said, “Sometimes Bell does not even ‘mean’ to bowl the magic ball.” Harris’s statement illustrated perfectly Bell’s magic ball to Wolvaardt, which jagged severely back on the batters and caused the ball to clip the inside edge of Wolvaardt’s bat. Whether by design or instinct, this also revealed a deeper insight into the nature of Bell’s bowling; Bell’s ability to control the ball will allow her natural abilities to prevail. Cricket often rewards those who can refrain from attempting to force their way to an outcome.
Economy Without Retreating
Perhaps the most telling number of Bell’s season isn’t the eight wickets she has taken yet, but rather, the timing and manner in which she takes them. Operating mainly in the Powerplay portion of the innings, Bell has also had limited opportunities to bowl during the death phase, where she can use her slower ball and hard length bowling to create a challenge for batters under pressure.
The demise of Shafali Verma was the classic T20 trap: the batter attempting to take the game away, while the bowler simply removed some pace off the ball (without losing form) to make it difficult for the batter to get into an attacking position. The act of doing this with a damp ball, under dew, on a surface that is slippery, takes more than courage; it takes skillful repetition. Bell has not only survived these challenging situations, but she has also controlled them. It is the ability to be adaptable that differentiates an effective bowler from a strategic one.
Depth Over Dependency
The one danger for the RCB team is not just Lauren Belll’s high batting score, but also the fact that this team does not rely solely on her to perform well. Smriti Mandhana, Richa Ghosh, Grace Harris, Shreyanka Patil, Radha Yadav, and others have all contributed in a major way when it counted. Additionally, even some of the new players, such as Georgia Voll and Sayali Satghare, were able to step up into the lineup without disrupting the existing structure of the team.
RCB’s imperfect game has worked so well that its imperfection has become irrelevant. A total of six dropped catches in just four matches is not a minor weakness. The two top-order collapses suggest that batting isn’t as unassailable as we were initially led to believe. Yet it has been shown many times throughout history that great teams will find a way to win regardless of mistakes; rather than never making one. In every situation where RCB has felt pressure, they have responded with a solution. Thus, the overall trend is what should be most relevant to us, rather than perfection.
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