WPL 2024 final: What Delhi Capitals captain Meg Lanning said to RCB skipper Smriti Mandhana

WPL 2024 finals: Smriti Mandhana's (left) Royal Challengers Bangalore will take on Meg Lanning's Delhi Capitals on March 17, 2024. (Photo credit: RCB)

Flashback to March 2023: Smriti Mandhana is having a terrible season as captain and batter in her Women’s Premier League (WPL) side Royal Challengers Bangalore’s (RCB). Her batting average is below 20 across eight league matches and her side has lost their first five matches, a run that would deal a body blow to their underwhelming first WPL season.

Her team, studded with some of the world’s most feted cricketers, including Mandhana herself, the costliest WPL player in the franchise at INR 3.4 crore, would go on to finish an unremarkable fourth in the five-team competition. If damp squibs had a cricketing form, Mandhana’s RCB embodied their very essence in WPL’s launch year.

In one of her first interviews towards the business end of the tournament, she would tell former India Women head coach, WV Raman, on a Sportstar podcast, how, to her surprise, then Australia captain Meg Lanning, a six-time World Cup winner, who was leading the Delhi Capitals, would do something simple but remarkable: walk up to her and check if Mandhana had been doing alright – mentally.

At a time when little seemed to work in Mandhana's or RCB's favour – no matter how hard they tried – the gesture and some advice from Lanning on the batting, Mandhana said, made a world of difference to the RCB and India opener’s morale.

Soon after the interview, clips of Lanning interacting with Mandhana by the boundary rope in the 11th match of WPL 2023 in Mumbai emerged on social media. It was largely thanks to the legions of fans of Mandhana, who has over 15 million followers across Instagram, Facebook and X, that those 15 seconds of broadcast footage from WPL’s media rights-holders, Viacom18, found a new meaning in the wider discourse on the cricketing journey of Mandhana, an ICC Women’s Cricketer of the Year awardee in 2018 who’s copped criticism in recent years for being unable to bring her batting back to the big time like the days of yore.

WPL 2024 final: What captains Smriti Mandhana & Meg Lanning said

Cut to March 16, 2024. It’s around 1:30pm, and some 10 journalists have showed up at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in India’s national capital, New Delhi, to cover the pre-final captains’ press conference of WPL 2024. The press corps’ subjects on the day are Lanning, who helmed Delhi Capitals’ direct entry into the WPL final for a second straight season, and something of an unlikely pick for her opposite number at the second WPL season’s title clash: Mandhana.

Fresh off a thrilling final-ball victory in the Eliminator the previous evening at the same venue against the defending champions Mumbai Indians, who were heavy favourites to saunter into a second successive final, Mandhana appeared decidedly relaxed like her Capitals counterpart since walking into the media-conference room. Laced with laughs, considered thoughts and a refreshing dose of self-deprecating humour from both speakers, the 15-and-a-half-minute presser had the duo take turns to look back on the ebbs and flows of their WPL and international careers to date.

Towards the close of the media interaction, up came a question that had Mandhana, somewhat surprised, jog her memory back to that March evening from a year ago when Lanning’s kindness left an indelible impression on her.

“Should I answer this before the match?” Mandhana said in jest to open her response to the question from this writer. “No, jokes aside, definitely, last year wasn’t the greatest of campaigns for RCB and as well for me. I remember after the second match, against DC, she came up to me and we had a little bit of 10-15 minutes of conversation, which was really cool because at that time, even how much ever you play — sometimes you play as (many) numbers of international cricket [but] when sometimes you’re going through something of that sort, a little conversation with someone who understands batting as much you do (looks at Lanning), that really helps. So, definitely, that was an amazing thing she did and it really taught me as well how to look up to even other players from other teams if they’re not doing well.”

Thoughtful and patient, Mandhana chose her words carefully, perhaps like Lanning had 12 months ago when Mandhana was struggling as a batter and captain. The Australian’s act, as it would later turn out, unwittingly left a more profound imprint on Mandhana than she herself realised at the time. For, two months after that improbable sideline rendezvous, Mandhana revealed at the Outlook Business Awards 2023, that the female cricketer she had started looking up to since her early days in professional cricket was Meg Lanning, a captain and batter unrivalled in the women’s game.

“From the time I debuted (in international cricket in 2013), Meg Lanning was the top run-scorer for Australia, and (I) had always looked up to her,” said Mandhana, 27, a tad embarrassed by the disclosure, given Lanning’s presence right next to her. “I remember the 2016 tour (of Australia) where, for the first time, I was playing against Australia in Australia. I remember she had properly flicked a pace bowler over fine leg for a six and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s some shot.’ She wouldn’t probably remember that (smiles, as does Lanning). That time, I was like, ‘OK, if you really want to play, be good at cricket and women’s cricket, that’s something you really need to improve.’”

Before long, it was Lanning’s turn to reflect on Mandhana’s evolution, as she has seen it first-hand, since that 2016 tour, where Mandhana played a key role in helping India register their first victory in any format over Australia in their backyard.

“Oh, she’s spoken really nicely about me, so I better go back with it,” chuckled Lanning, who retired from international cricket, much to the wider cricketing world’s shock, in October last year on the back of her struggles with an undisclosed medical issue. “Oh, look, I think whenever we came up against India, we always used to talk about Smriti and how we could get her out early, because we knew how dangerous she could be.

“She is match-winner and a proven match-winner in any conditions. So, tomorrow, that’s something that we’ll certainly be looking to avoid because they’ve got some amazing players and Smriti is one of them. And she’s on her own leadership journey as well, I guess, going through the ups and downs, and it sounds like Smriti is really starting to understand the ins and outs of that and, obviously, has done an excellent job with RCB this year.”

There’s little doubt the match will be intense when Mandhana and Lanning, 31, lead their sides out at the Sunday’s final, sold-out, as per the WPL’s ticketing partner bookmyshow.com. But that both took a moment during Saturday’s pre-final presser to appreciate the present and the past came as a reminder of the beauty and cruelty of the elite sport.