🏏 Ellyse Perry is continuing her late-career transformation in this year's WPL

My Week in Sport(s) 🏏 ⚽️ 🏒 🎾 ⛳️

Feb 28, 2025

Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.

Covered in this edition: 🏏 Ellyse Perry, ⚽️ Ousmane Dembélé, 🏒 Connor McDavid, 🎾 Mirra Andreeva and ⛳️ Ludvig Åberg.

🏆 I’m delighted to share that I’ve have been shortlisted in the Data Journalist category at this year's British Sports Journalism Awards for my work at Plot the Ball! You can see the full shortlist — which includes journalists from the BBC, The Times, The Athletic and Opta Analyst — here.

🏏 Ellyse Perry is continuing her late-career transformation in this year's WPL

I sometimes wonder if beating England ever gets old for Ellyse Perry. During her first eight years in Australian colours, the two nations’ storied rivalry in women’s cricket was competitive — but her team have now held the Ashes for almost a decade.

Perry — who also represented her country in international football — won the ‘Player of the Series’ award in Australia’s victories in 2015 and 2019, but was a much more peripheral figure in this year’s win. (Six Australian batters faced more balls than she did over the course of the series, and eight teammates bowled more.) This was partly because of injury, but her role has also changed as she’s aged. She has bowled much less since 2021 — and she’s no longer the team’s primary fast-bowling all-rounder.

While Perry now mostly contributes with the bat in international cricket, the shorter T20 format hasn’t been one of her strengths. Like many other technically excellent batters, she hasn’t always been comfortable taking the risks necessary to score runs efficiently. Using my favoured ‘runs vs. expectation’ metric to assess her career in top franchise competitions, we can see this clearly. For much of her career, Perry tended to score at or below the match-average run rate. Then, in 2023, something changed.

Since that year’s WBBL, scoring quickly has become a habit for Perry. In this year’s WPL in India, she’s already recorded three rapid innings of 50 runs or more; going into yesterday’s game, she had scored around 16 runs more than expected per 100 balls over her last 30 innings. Assessed by this metric, there are three distinct periods in her franchise T20 career: a stretch prior to 2020 where she scored runs at an average rate, an immediate post-pandemic slump and now this late-career surge.

Last year, I called this version of her game ‘Perry 2.0’; really, it’s ‘Perry 3.0’. What changes has she made? Her non-boundary scoring has improved a bit, but she’s truly elevated her power-hitting. Since 2023, her effective boundary rate has been more than four percentage points better than other batters in her games; in those two earlier phases, it was below average. Some women’s T20 might now be played at hitter-friendly grounds, but Perry’s transformation is anything but circumstantial.

⚽️ Ousmane Dembélé is playing more in a new role for PSG — and producing more than ever

It’s always nice to see people on my social media timelines talking about 27-year-old French international Ousmane Dembélé actually playing football, rather than missing games due to injury.

In August 2023 — when he last featured in this newsletter — the forward had just finished his sixth year at Barcelona; he never played more than 52% of the available minutes in a single season for the Spanish club. He joined PSG that summer, though, and things immediately improved: he got on the field 59% of the time during his first year in Paris. So far this season, he’s playing even more football — 64% of all Ligue 1 and Champions League minutes — and is thriving in a new role through the middle.

For the first time since his age-19 season, Dembélé has played at least 60% of the time for his club side. It’s been easily the most productive year of his pro career to date, too: often stationed between two other wingers, he’s less involved in the team’s ball progression — but is taking around five shots per 90 minutes. With one of the sweetest ball-strikers in the game getting on the end of lots of chances, the rest of PSG’s Champions League run — as long as it lasts — should be appointment viewing.

What else I learned last week

🏒 Connor McDavid excelled in an unusual way at the 4 Nations Face-Off

In the end, the 4 Nations Face-Off was (almost) everything Canadian hockey fans had hoped for. All of the team’s stars showed up to play — and Connor McDavid, the best player of his generation, delivered a ‘signature moment’ in the title decider.

As well as scoring the winning goal against the USA, McDavid was also one of the best skaters in the tournament by ‘net rating’ — Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic’s all-in-one impact metric. The distribution of his contributions was a little different than usual, though. For Canada, he added about 40% of his estimated value — measured in net goals above average — when his team didn’t have the puck; in the NHL this year, however, only 20% of his impact has come at the defensive end of the ice.

🎾 Mirra Andreeva aced her biggest test en route to the Dubai title

Mirra Andreeva — the 17-year-old Russian who began 2025 as the only teenager ranked in the WTA’s top 100 — has risen even further in women’s tennis since we discussed her game during the Australian Open last month.

After becoming the youngest-ever winner of a WTA 1000 event in Dubai last weekend, she’s now up to fourth in Tennis Abstract’s Elo rankings. The dominance of her return game continued — she won 51.2% of points on her opponent’s serve, comfortably the most of any player in the tournament — but it was Andreeva’s own serve that helped her on her way to a win over Iga Świątek. The ace rate of 15.2% she recorded in the Dubai quarter-final was the highest of any match in her career to date.

⛳️ Ludvig Åberg has quickly developed into one of Europe’s top golfers

Ludvig Åberg’s career got off to a really fast start. The Swede — who played college golf in the USA — was selected for the 2023 Ryder Cup only a few months after turning professional, and he’s continued to develop at pace.

His second PGA Tour win — at the Genesis Invitational a couple of weeks ago — came in his 40th start; only a handful of others have been as successful to begin their careers. And he’s likely to have cemented himself as one of Europe’s top players by the time the Ryder Cup comes around again later this year: Data Golf’s current skill rankings peg Åberg as the continent’s fifth-best men’s golfer, while only Rory McIlroy has banked more ‘Data Golf Points’ across the 2024 and 2025 seasons than he has.