IPL: Inconsistency hurts Mumbai Indains as defending champions bow out in league stage
It all came down to just 65 runs on Friday, which sealed the fate of the Mumbai Indians in the 2021 Indian Premier League (IPL), as the defending champions dropped out of the playoff race after they failed to stop Sunrisers Hyderabad on 65 in a 55 match in Abu Dhabi on Friday.
Mumbai Indians posted 236 for 5 on the board and then had to stop SRH at 65 to beat Kolkata Knight Riders’ net run rate and grab the fourth knockout berth. But Rohit Sharma’s bag of tricks fell flat as SRH reached 193 for 8 in reply to MI’s highest-ever score in T20 cricket.
Notably, Mumbai had to beat SRH by 171 runs or more to leapfrog Kolkata Knight Riders on the points table and qualify for the play-offs.
KKR won their final league game by 86 runs against RR to finish on 14 points from as many games with a NRR of +0.587. MI needed Rohit to win the toss and bat first to stay in the playoffs race, at least until the first innings of Match 55.
But that didn’t happen despite MI producing a performance for the ages in their final game, which was also the penultimate league match of IPL 2021.
FAILED BID TO DEFEND IPL TITLE
This is the first time in three years that Mumbai Indians have failed to qualify for the Indian Premier League playoffs. They have won the title 5 times – 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 & 2020 – and been eliminated from the playoffs four times including the runners-up finish in 2010.
But they have also been knocked out in the league stage 4 times in the past in 2007, 2008, 2016 and 2018. So what went so wrong for a team which won the league in the last two seasons?
INDIAN BATSMEN FLOP
The biggest issue MI faced this season was the form of its Indian batting contingent as the likes of Rohit Sharma, Suryakumar Yadav, Ishan Kishan and Hardik Pandya which has led to their downfall this time.
Rohit has got starts but has not been able to convert them, but it’s the batsmen after him who have struggled big time in IPL 2021. Ishan (157 runs) is averaging just over 19 while Suryakumar (235) has done even worse at 18.07.
All-rounder Hardik has played 11 games and managed just 117 runs at 14.62 while his older brother Krunal has has played a game more but averages the same with the bat.
TEAM DIDN’T CLICK AS A UNIT
The MI bowlers, Rohit and all-rounder Kieron Pollard kept producing good performances individually throughout the season but they never clicked as a unit in IPL 2021, which is why the team struggled to register wins consistently throughout the season.
Rohit and Jasprit Bumrah are the only two MI players present in the top-10 run-scorers and wicket-takers’ lists this season. Rohit is the team’s highest scorer with 363 runs while Bumrah has taken 19 wickets.
Rahul Chahar (13 wickets), Trent Boult (12) and Pollard (232 runs & 5 wickets) have also been brilliant for MI. But this year they just didn’t perform like the well-oiled unit that we are accustomed to seeing every year which is also the reason why the team crashed out in the league stage once again.
NO LUCK OR GLORY IN THE UAE
Mumbai Indians were going strong in the first phase of IPL 2021 in India with 4 wins and 3 losses from 7 games.
They were initially based at the MA Chidambaram stadium in Chennai where they won 2 and lost 2 games before shifting to Delhi where they emerged victorious in both the games before the league got postponed in May due to the Covid-19 pandemic’s second wave in India.
Things took a turn for the worse for MI from that point onwards as the season restarted in September in the UAE, where they lifted their fifth trophy just over a year ago. Fans expected Rohit Sharma’s side to repeat what they did here in 2020 but the complete opposite has happened this time as MI have lost 4 of the 6 games played so far.
MI won the last game in Sharjah and one before that in Abu Dhabi and will hoping to bow out of the competition with another triumph to bring some smile on the faces of their fans back home.
