The race to qualify for the Playoffs has gotten hotter as IPL 2016 enters the last week of the league phase. Mumbai Indians, with inconsistent performances – their wins looked awesome while they were miserable in their defeats – have no option but to come up trumps in their remaining two games and stay alive.
With 12 points from a dozen games, the reigning champions can reach a maximum of 16 points and see how the other teams fare, four of them are sitting above them before the start of Saturday's matches while two others are breathing down their neck.
As their home matches have been moved out of their fortress Wankhede, Mumbai Indians have felt anything except being at home at the YS Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium here. They barely put up a score on the board, dismissed for 92 by Sunrisers Hyderabad and 124/9 by Kings XI Punjab, both times succumbing to seam bowling.
Mumbai Indians are to face more seam bowling when they take on the Daredevils, that has in their ranks the master craftsman Zaheer Khan, India paceman Mohammad Shami and South African wily customer Chris Morris, not to mention the talented Nathan Coulter-Nile from Australia. And, there is no dearth of spin bowling in Amit Mishra, the only spinner in the top-12 bowlers with most wickets this IPL as on Friday night.
Coming from the comforts of a sporting Wankhede pitch, where the ball comes nicely on to bat, to the slowness of the Vizag pitch, where one has to dig deep and apply like how KXIP captain Murali Vijay and wicketkeeper Wriddhiman Saha did on Friday night while raising 116-run match-winning partnership in tricky circumstances, Mumbai have been found wanting.
Chasing totals in excess of 180 have been possible at the Wankhede whereas it has been a struggle even to surpass scores less than 140 as Rising Pune Supergiants suffered at the hands of Sunrisers Hyderabad last Tuesday. Even in the T20I that was played in February here, Sri Lanka were bowled out for 82 with Ravichandran Ashwin picking up four wickets up front.
Even in chasing scores, RPS fell short by four runs while KXIP had only 125 to pursue. The cushion of knowing the small target and planning the innings accordingly helped Punjab. This was not the case when MI batted. Their batsmen went for shots and in the process, lost early wickets and couldn't recover well.
Mumbai Indians skipper Rohit Sharma admitted after Friday's seven-wicket loss to Kings XI that chasing is not the best option on such "slower" pitches and it was important to score maximum runs in power play.
Of the Vizag pitch, he said: "When you play on these kinds of pitches where the ball is turning and stopping, it is not easy for batsmen. You have to rotate strike as much as possible. If you don't rotate, then pressure builds. In the three games played here so far, it is difficult to get eight or nine runs an over. The pitch keeps getting slower and slower. It is important that you capitalise in the first six overs and then in the middle overs, you try and knock it around, rotate strike and get six or seven an over, which we could not get."
So, what is the right way to bat on such a pitch? Saha, who scored 56 in 40 balls at No. 3 to architect KXIP's crucial win, said: "The pitch was assisting spin. We thought we will try to extend the partnership till the end and hit out in the end if 30-40 runs were needed in the last four overs. The pitch was a little soft, helping spinners big time."
Mumbai Indians have been bad at setting targets this IPL. They lost four out of the five times they batted first while they've chased successfully on five occasions. Will he choose to bat first again if he won the toss against DD on Sunday?
"It's too early to say. We'll see what sort of wicket we get. We will see what is best for the team and we should be comfortable doing it," he said. "Having said that, chasing is not really an option here. The wicket kept getting slower and slower. It was never going to be easy even chasing 140."
Sharma, and Mumbai Indians, know that they cannot leave anything to chance.
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