Fielding Flops & Catch Drops: The WPL & Women's Cricket's Worst Enemy

The former BCCI Secretary and current ICC Chairman Jay Shah posted on X (formerly Twitter) just a few hours ago that the first leg of the 2025 edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL) has already seen a surge of 150% in TV ratings and 70% in digital viewership from the last season. 

This means that the audience who got hooked to the WPL last year definitely came back to the product, which looks much more glitzy and potent than last year. It’s evident that the league has also attracted new audiences after the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) won the trophy last year. 

Women’s cricket is on the rise. It’s shown on prime-time TV. The BCCI has also finally realised that they can’t schedule WPL matches and the India men’s game on the same day. 

Growth is happening in the women’s game in India, and there’s definitely a buzz around it. 

However, if there’s one strong criticism or a point noticed by many such new viewers, it is that the fielding standards are nowhere near what they are used to seeing in men’s cricket. While that’s a debatable proposition and demands much more detailed scrutiny than this, one thing is clear — catching efficiency and ground fielding hasn’t been a strong point for the league since its inception. 

Contrary to expectations, it’s not just a problem related to Indian players. 

Take for instance the first leg of the 2025 WPL season in Vadodara where Georgia Wareham, Annabel Sutherland and Sarah Bryce are in the top three of players with most drops so far (two). In fact, if you look at the fielding record of teams from the 2024 WBBL season, you’ll find that the catching efficiency numbers are quite similar to the numbers in the WPL so far. 

Meanwhile, if you go a bit further back to the 2024 T20 World Cup, the fielding standards were even poorer there, with New Zealand and India being the best catching sides with only 72.1% and 69% catching efficiency. However, the difference in net runs saved in both the leagues (WBBL and WPL) do reflect a general disparity between the fitness levels in both Australia and India since. 

To understand it better, it was crucial to gauge where the issue arises from. Hence, we contacted someone who coaches young women cricketers right from the infancy of their cricket careers to the very top. Arjun Dev, who founded and runs the NICE Cricket Academy in Bengaluru and also coaches international players Shreyanka Patil and Arundhati Reddy there, feels the problem lies at a more basic level. 

“I can’t be too sure as to why it [so many drops in WPL] happens but some of the reasons I can think of are that the dew in Baroda was apparently more than most people have experienced. So the really wet ball obviously makes catching tough,” Dev told Cricket.com. 

“Then, playing under lights is not something most girls get to do regularly so that takes some time getting used to. Also, girls generally have smaller hands so it [catching] ain’t as easy as for Men despite the ball being smaller.”

All these issues — dew, lights and smaller hands — certainly seem to explain a lot because when the 2024 T20 World Cup was held in a new venue in Dubai where the ring of fire style of floodlights blinds the fielders while catching, and the dew is always an issue. 

Meanwhile, we have also seen many such instances where the ball pops out of the hands of fielders in the WPL even after they seemed to have initially held onto it. The roughly 15gm difference between the balls used in men’s and women’s cricket along with the few centimetres in circumference certainly is a crucial factor to consider there.  

However, the next question arising from here is almost natural — these problems have always existed. So how come teams and players and coaches and the entire ecosystem in general have failed to raise the standards of fielding in women’s cricket? 

Well, the answer at the surface level is easy because women’s cricket is very rarely played under lights outside of the top three nations (Australia, England and India). Resource allocation in women’s cricket has always been a challenge, where a lot of time is spent on working on core skills and the fielding focus is lost. 

However, these reasons are still valid at the domestic level. At the international level and in world-class leagues like the WBBL and the WPL, where top players are in action and almost everything is at their disposal, their reasons sound like lame excuses. 

That is exactly what Delhi Capital’s fielding coach, Biju George, told us when we asked him about it.

“In T20, there is no place to hide,” George said. 

“Earlier it was thought that the third man short fine leg fielder would be safe. But with the lap shots and the reverse laps coming in, that's also become a hot zone.”

For George it’s very simple — the players have to make a judgement on their fitness level and improve their movement across the turf. That’s what some big names in Indian cricket like Mithali Raj (who has 93% catching efficiency in ODIs where data is available) used to do, and hence they were always safe fielders.

“Fielding focus stems from the players' activity level on the field. If I am not good enough in fielding, do I still get to play in the team? Or do I manage to make it to a spot? That has to go away. Fielding has to be number one,” George remarked. 

“I remember the time I was with them [Indian team], and I still have huge respect to Mithali and Jhulan. Despite the level of cricket they have played and the legends they have, they used to come and do the hard yards. Never used to just swing up. 

“I still remember Mithali, even though she had a dodgy knee at that time, she used to come and do her piece of diving, sliding, everything. And these two were one of the most efficient catchers I've ever seen.”

The issue of fielding in women’s cricket overall is clearly a systemic one, as both Dev and George highlighted. But at the elite level, coaches and players need to put in a lot more effort from their end as well to put some focus on their fielding. 

You see, butter fingers and fielding focus isn’t just an Indian women’s cricket or WPL problem. It’s a complex one, and needs redressal at all levels of cricket.