Mumbai: Delhi Capitals skipper Meg Lanning heaped praise on her opening partner Shafali Verma, calling her knock of 84 off 45 balls “amazing” in her side’s 60-run win over Royal Challengers Bangalore in the second match of Women’s Premier League at the Brabourne Stadium on Sunday.
Meg was involved in a brilliant 162-run opening partnership off 87 balls with Shafali as they set the base for Delhi to post a massive 223/2 in 20 overs. Tara Norris then took the competition’s first five-fer to restrict Bangalore to 163/8.
“It was a great atmosphere out there and happy to get the win. Shafali was playing amazing out there. It was a lot of fun. We were smiling a lot of the time. That’s the great thing about these competitions.”
“You get to play with people you wouldn’t play with normally, you get to have a lot of fun and you learn something. We felt it was a good score, but the wicket was so good that we knew we needed to bowl well,” said Meg in the post-match presentation ceremony.
Royal Challengers Bangalore captain Smriti Mandhana rued the starts which the batters didn’t get and pace bowling department not giving the desired control. Bangalore will be up against Mumbai Indians on Monday at Brabourne Stadium, the venue where they lost to Delhi on Sunday.
“Definitely not the start we wanted. We gave 20-30 runs extra. We’ll think about our plans and come back stronger tomorrow. As a pace bowling unit, we didn’t go pace off like Delhi did so that’s one thing we need to think of and work on.”
“We are used to playing in other franchises back-to-back but for us to take positives out of this and things that didn’t go our way, we have a few hours to think about it and come back stronger tomorrow. I don’t think the pitch or wicket changed. Our batters, we all got starts but couldn’t continue. Batters got starts like me and Heather but we couldn’t take it over.”
(IANS)
