Every WPL season produces a handful of players whose names end up on the posters: the openers who clear the rope in the first over, the finishers who turn a lost cause into a highlight package. Yastika Bhatia is rarely one of them, and that tells you more about how we watch franchise cricket than it does about her.
Mumbai Indians have been built around star power, but star power needs a frame. Bhatia’s role in that frame has been to be the batter the rest of the order can play around.
The job description
Keeping wicket in a T20 side is already a full-time job. Doing it while batting in the top order asks for a particular temperament: the ability to move from managing a bowling attack’s plans to executing your own within minutes. Bhatia’s batting is built on that temperament. She is not trying to win the powerplay on her own. She is trying to make sure it is not lost.
In practice that means a lot of placement over power, a preference for the gaps square of the wicket, and an eye for the bowler who has missed a length. It is batting that shows up more clearly in a scorebook than on a clip.
Why it goes unnoticed
Franchise cricket rewards the extraordinary innings, and a top-order batter whose value lies in the absence of collapses is structurally difficult to celebrate. Nobody writes about the middle order that did not have to rebuild from ten for three. But that is the kind of evening a steady top order prevents, and the benefit shows up in the freedom the hitters below enjoy.
There is also the familiar problem of the keeper-batter being judged on the wrong criteria. Compared with specialist openers, her strike rate will rarely top a chart. Compared with the value of a second skill in a squad with a salary cap, the case looks very different.
What to watch next
The next step is the one every accumulator faces: converting reliable starts into the occasional innings that changes a match on its own. That is where the attention goes, fairly or not. Whether she makes that shift or not, Mumbai Indians already know what they have, and so, increasingly, do the opposition analysts who plan around her.
If you only watch the highlights, you will miss her. If you watch the whole innings, you will see why the side keeps picking her.
