This is a team that has won five Indian Premier League titles, it has the India captain and vice-captain in its ranks, it also has the world’s best T20I batter (by the ICC rankings) and the top wicket-taker of the current season. Yet, the Mumbai Indians are the first team to be knocked out of the competition and the only thing most fans will probably remember from the 2024 season will be the sound of boos ringing from the stands.
But that is how professional sport can be sometimes. Sometimes, the best laid plans are not enough. Perhaps the problems started even before the season began when Hardik Pandya was named skipper ahead of Rohit Sharma. And then things got progressively worse, to a point where one might say that MI are happy the season is done and dusted.
They can go back to the drawing board and plan for next season. But for that to happen, they will need to understand what went wrong first. What was the trigger? Why was the dressing room lacking the buzz? Why a team of superstars failed?
“The senior players made it known on more than one occasion to the management through the right sources that they felt Hardik was ineffective as leader,” a team official said on condition of anonymity.
The harder Hardik tried, the more he smiled, the deeper he seemed to sink into the quicksand that a poor season can very quickly become.
Hardik’s decision to hold back Jasprit Bumrah’s overs when SRH amassed 277, his call to bowl the final over against Chennai Super Kings – MS Dhoni took him for 20 runs — all came under scrutiny. Hardik would come out to defend the team’s eight losses wearing a synthetic smile, but his public remonstration of young Tilak Varma’s game-sense after the Delhi Capitals match did not go well in the dressing room.
Even as pictures of bowlers running to Rohit for advice and field settings became a regular occurrence, the horse had bolted. The management stuck with Hardik as captain. Perhaps time might show that this was the right call but for now, for this season, it was as wrong as wrong can be.
HARDIK’S POOR FORM
It did not help matters that Hardik’s form with bat or ball was poor all through the tournament. His best showing with the ball — 3/31 against Sunrisers Hyderabad – came too late. His 11 wickets came at an ER of 10.58. He batted everywhere between 4-7 in the order but could never navigate his team to safety or reconstruct the kind of innings that once made him a feared finisher. Mumbai, he quickly discovered, was nothing like Gujarat.
SPIN WOES
It’s a travesty that MI haven’t been able to find a bowling attack to complement Bumrah’s four-over quota. Gerald Coetzee (13 wickets, ER 10.17) tried with his energetic spells but is not a finished product yet. The others didn’t even come close.
MI’s returns in the spin department (13 wickets, Avg 40, ER 9.14) were particularly poor, the second-worst behind SRH. With veteran Piyush Chawla as their lead spinner, MI’s bowling had gaping holes which they could not fill despite the Impact Player rule.
OFF-COLOUR TOP ORDER
Where MI stood out from other teams in their squad formation was in the strength of their Indian batting core – Suryakumar Yadav, Ishan Kishan, Tilak Varma along with Hardik and Rohit — gave them an intimidating look. But in a season where boundary hitting has been redefined, the MI top order has fallen well short. Not once have they featured in the top 10 powerplay scores despite having a batting-friendly surface at home. Their losses have a correlation to enduring a poor batting powerplay (7 mat, 18 wkts, RR 8.92). When they win, they score more and lose fewer wickets.
Other than his unbeaten hundred against CSK, where he failed to take the team over the line, Rohit has not made an impact with the bat. His last few knocks don’t make for happy reading: 6, 8, 4, 11, 4. Kishan, too, hasn’t been able to lift his team’s fortunes.
Yadav stamped his class with his 102* in the previous match against SRH, but his late arrival — he missed the first three matches due to injury — hurt MI’s chances. In the death overs, Tim David had his moments (241 runs, SR 161) and Romario Shepherd’s 32 runs off Anrich Nortje’s final over won’t be forgotten; but as a collective, MI’s death overs scoring rate (171.29) is only seventh best among all teams.
They remained good at home but MI’s away record (30.7%) has plummeted in the last two years. This will be the fourth year where MI will stay away from the trophy. With a mega auction to follow, a team overhaul is inevitable. But with several hurt egos in the side, will MI manage to retain their core?
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