Mumbai finally show their true colors

I was just thinking about Mumbai Indians who with great difficulty chased down a total or 99 runs against Trinidad&Tobago last week at Bangalore. That was the lucky game for Mumbai who should have lost that had T&T played their full quota of 20 overs. And, that game happened to be completed yesterday at Chennai when all that Mumbai Indians could manage was a mere 100 runs on the board with no strike rates worth mentioning and no good scores as well. The highest individual score from Mumbai happened to be from James Franklin who scored 42 at number 4.

Mumbai Indians has entered the champions league tournament being placed third in the domestic T20 competition ahead of Kolkata Knight Riders. But, fascinating thing is that Kolkata are found putting up a better performance compared to the other three teams from the country. Yesterday, the Mumbai Indians had a total of just 58 on the board deducting James Franklin's 42 and removing the extras, the score drops to 51 runs from 69 balls at a run rate of 4.43 runs an over. Even with Franklin's 42, the run rate was just 5.00 runs an over which is not the latest run-rate in test cricket.

Looking at the way the Mumbai batsmen played, the New South Wales' captain - Simon Katich did't opt for more than 5 bowlers by having all five bowlers bowl their full quota of 4 overs. One has to wonder as to how come the Mumbai Indians didn't get bowled out when they had 3 wickets still left in hand? Moreover, there was only one over maiden which meant that 19 overs had atleast one run in it. This is a special case of batting where neither overs go maiden nor does the team gets bowled out nor is there any high scoring involved whatsoever.

If that was Mumbai Indians, the New South Wales also never had a ball with their batting. They too had initial blows when the top four batsmen namely David Warner, Shane Watson, Daniel Smith and Simon Katich had to depart scoring single digit scores. The New South Wales had to wail for Steven Smith to cut loose along with Ben Rohrer. After that, there was only one wicket that fell. The entire match consisted of just one six from the blades of Steven Smith. However, the most economical bowler happened to be from Mumbai Indians when Abu Nechim had figures of 4-0-23-3.