With just 118 runs on the board, not many would have put their money on Sunrisers Hyderabad to beat Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede Stadium on Sachin Tendulkar’s birthday night.
Because no team had defended this total in an IPL game played in India. And, Sunrisers hitherto had never beaten Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede.
Also, they didn’t have at their disposal Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who missed the game because of a sore back. And, even with Kumar, Sunrisers had conceded over 180 runs and lost their two previous games.
In short, Sunrisers needed to work a miracle to defend a paltry score against the star-studded batting line-up of Mumbai Indians. And, that’s what they did.
Wrecking the Mumbai top order
The Wankhede pitch on Tuesday night wasn’t very conducive for batting. Kane Williamson and Mohammad Nabi apart, the rest of the Sunrisers line up struggled against Mumbai’s pace battery – comprising Mitchell McCelenaghan (who picked up two wickets), Jasprit Bumrah (one), Mustafizur Rahman (one) and Hardik Pandya (two) – and their new spin revelation Mayank Markande, who struck twice to reclaim the purple cap.
As Rohit Sharma conceded after the match, shot-making wasn’t easy on the pitch. And, bowling of both teams were error-free. But batsmen from both teams made it a contest of who’ll crumble faster?
And the winner was Mumbai Indians.
Sandeep Sharma sowed the seed for an early wicket in his first over by strangling Evin Lewis with the swing on the last three balls. Off the third ball, Sandeep almost got Lewis to drive straight to cover. He beat the batsmen with the fourth. The fifth one struck Lewis’ pads.
Lewis might have breathed easy after hitting a boundary on the first ball of Sandeep’s second over. But the bowler beat his bat again. The 26-year-old was being tormented. Swing was a nightmare that the West Indies opener wanted to avoid. So, he premeditated another swinging one from Sandeep, came down the track, chased down a ball that was going down the legside, got a leading edge that went to Manish Pandey’s hands.
“A few of us played bad shots including myself,” said Rohit after the match.
One of them was Ishan Kishan. He came down the track for a floated delivery, got beaten in the flight and miscued a lofted shot to the long-off fielder.
An over later, the captain himself fell for a nicely tossed up delivery, pitched outside off by Shakib Al Hasan. Rohit drove without moving his feet, and edged it to his India opening partner Shikhar Dhawan in the slip.
Rashid Khan’s comeback
That Shakib over, probably also gave leg-spinner Rashid Khan the reason to go for the kill.
The best of the bowlers can have a bad day. Maybe even two on the trot. But they bounce back. Rashid did, and how!
After the fall of Rohit, Suryakumar Yadav and Krunal Pandya were beginning to consolidate Mumbai’s position and made 24 runs off the eighth and ninth overs. Then, Williamson brought on Rashid.
The hammering he received from Gayle and Raina didn’t seem to dent Rashid’s confidence. He tossed up, dropped one short, bowled a googly. Suryakumar Yadav, Mumbai’s best batsman of the night, was struggling to pick Rashid.
Over No 10: 2 runs.
Shakib then complemented Rashid, giving just three away in the next.
The pressure was back again on Mumbai after playing seven dots in two overs and scoring no boundaries.
Rashid returned in the next over to trap Krunal Pandya leg before wicket and break the highest partnership of the match (40).
In his third over, he removed the out-of-form Pollard with a slider that the West Indian tried to late-cut despite the presence of a close first slip and ended up guiding the ball to Dhawan.
Rashid returned in the 17th over to suffocated the Mumbai Indians with a maiden.
Kaul’s three-wicket haul
The other star performer of the day was medium pacer Siddharth Kaul.
The 27-year-old normally plays second fiddle to Bhuvneshwar Kumar in the Sunrisers’ bowling line-up. In his last two games, he’d been expensive as well. But, on Tuesday night, the onus was on him to restrict the Mumbai Indians.
His first over was after Rohit’s dismissal. Krunal Pandya and Suryakumar Yadav preferred to just knock the ball away for singles and Kaul gave away only four runs.
But his second over – ninth of the second innings – yielded three boundaries that released Sunrisers’ hold over Mumbai. Yadav and Krunal looked more relaxed after that over till Williamson suffocated them with spin.
But Kaul bounced back with a double-wicket over (the 16th of second innings) and returned to snuff out Mumbai’s final hope by dismissing Hardik Pandya. The three for 23 is his best of the season so far.
For this success he credited his senior Indian pacers Bhuvneshwar and Ashish Nehra.
“Bhuvi is there, before that Ashish Nehra was there and I learn a lot from them because they were champs in the IPL and international cricket as well. It really helped me,” he said after the match.
This match was a test of Sunrisers’ bowling unit’s strength in the absence of Bhuvneshwar and they have proven that they aren’t dependent on him. But the batting, so far, has been heavily dependent on Kane Williamson and Shikhar Dhawan.
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