Trailblazers becomes Women’s T20 challenge Champions

Trailblazers won the Women’s T20 challenge 2020 by defeating Supernovas for 16 runs.

Women’s T20 challenge 2020, was an initiative to bring Women’s cricket to the lime light.

Three teams where there in the tournament which were Supernovas, Trailblazers and Velocity, each of them played each other in the group stages. The final was between the top two on the list, which were Supernovas and Trailblazers.

The tournament was a female version of the Indian Premier League. The tournament usually happens in the middle of IPL season. Since there are only three teams, the Womens T20 Challenge takes only four days to complete.

Each team will get two matches in the first stage and the top two teams will play the finals.

This year all the three teams were able to secure a win in their first two matches. With the help of net run rate, Supernovas and Trailblazers managed to capture the first two spots.

In the final match Trailblazers bates first. With a fantastic half century from the captain Smriti Mandhana (68), the Indian international Trailblazers were able to host a total of 118 with the lost of 8 wickets.

Along with Smriti, Deandra Dotin (20) and Richa Ghosh (10) were the only two who saw double figures.

It was Radha Yadav, who ran through Trailblazer’s batting line up and limited their score to 118. Radha took 5 wickets in her four overs by conceding just 16 runs.

Poonam Yadav and Shashikala Siriwardene took one wickets each.

By batting second, Supernovas managed to take 102 runs only. Harmanpreet Kaur, captain of Supernovas was the top scorer of their team. Harmanpreet scored 30 runs of 36 balls.

By defending a lower score, Trailblazers were able to pick up wickets at a regular interval and that made them to limit Supernovas to a score of 102.

Salma Khatum took wickets in her four overs for the Trailblazers. Deepti Sharma and Sophie Ecclestone took two and one wickets respectively.

Smriti Mandhana was named as the player of the match and Radha Yadav as the player of the series.

“It feels great to pick a fifer, but isn’t nice to not be on the winning side. It was a spinning track and the plan was to bowl the normal stock ball. I worked very hard on my bowling in the lockdown, and I think it shows. I was playing consistently even in the lockdown and I was in touch, so it didn’t feel like I was coming back after a long time.” said Radha Yadav in the post match ceremony.

“It was a good time for all of us to go back and work on ourselves which we don’t get usually. My wicket was crucial because this wicket was tough to bat on. The set batsman needed to bat on, 140 was quite achievable and this is what I need to work on in finishing innings. I just told the girls that these are the last 20 overs of the tournament” said the winning team captain Smriti.