Vadodara, Feb 18
Delhi Capitals (DC) head coach Jonathan Batty said that his team fell 30-40 runs short of the competitive score as defending champions Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) comfortably chased 142 to register their second consecutive win in the Women's Premier League (WPL) 2025 season.

Although DC lost Shafali Verma in the opening over, they got off to a solid start thanks to Jemimah Rodrigues's aggressive batting during the powerplay. She scored 59 runs off 39 balls alongside Meg Lanning, but once she was dismissed, the innings collapsed which kept them far from the fighting total.

"Batting was probably more difficult at the start of the first innings, so I was pretty pleased coming out of the power play being 55 for 1," Batty admitted.

"I'd say the first two or three overs, I thought RCB bowled really, really well and I thought Meg and Jemimah fought really, really hard to get us to a really good place at the end of the power play. And then we obviously probably made it a little bit too easy for them to take our wickets, we were a little bit sloppy, potentially with some of our execution.

"They got a nice partnership going after Shafali's early dismissal. I thought they played positively as well and within sort of relatively low-risk shots. And then obviously all the batters who came in afterwards, most of them got reasonable starts, got into the teens, got into the 20s and just couldn't quite kick on. We probably needed another 50 or 60-run partnership somewhere within our batting unit to have got up to. I'm guessing probably 170 might have been a more realistic score to have even challenged and probably closer to 180 would have been probably par," he added.

After a subpar batting display, the bowlers were unable to apply much pressure on RCB. Smriti Mandhana took charge early, attacking Marizanne Kapp and leaving DC to chase the game. The opening partnership between Mandhana and Danni Wyatt-Hodge put up 107 runs in under 11 overs, effectively sealing the match's outcome.

"141 I don't think was ever really going to be enough," he said. "With the dew coming in again, batting certainly gets easier as you go through the evening. So we knew we were going to have to take wickets and bowl them out and that probably puts your bowling unit under a bit of pressure as well. So yeah, not quite enough runs I think sums it up.

"I thought they (RCB bowlers) were on the money particularly early on. I thought they were well managed by the captain out there as well and they never let us get away from them even though we sort of threatened a couple of times towards the end of the power play. They kept plugging away. I think they executed their skills pretty well through that middle phase of the game as well."

170 might have been a more realistic score against RCB, says DC coach Batty