Their chances of making it to the play-offs hang in a balance. The chennai super kings and the royal challengers bangalore have already selaed their play-offs spots in IPL 2011. The remaining 2 spots are now a contest between Kolkata knight riders, kings XI punjab and obviously Mumbai indians. Mumbai had been enjoying purple patches of impact players like Lasith malinga , Sachin tendulkar, Rohit Sharma and Ambati Rayudu. Also with players like Munaf Patel, Harbhajan Singh and the big boys Symonds and Pollard giving their share of good performances, Mumbai was winning matches pretty easily sometimes by a single handed effort of a Tendulkar, malinga or rohit. But recently all these palyers have run out of their form. The batting line up which seemed to be a mount everest for the opposition bowlers now looks vulnerable with Mumbai making a mess of even modest chases in 2 of their last 3 games. While against Kings XI punjab the bowlers were not able to pick early wickets which malinga had been doing in the season earlier and the batting was not even worthyy of talking about. A batting line up boasting of some of the biggest names folded for just 87 with notable failures of the team's sheet anchors tendulkar, rohit and rayudu. In the match against deccan chargers munaf patel's 5 minutes of madness against Amit mishra cost him 23 runs and his team a 10 run loss. Suddenly several problems have cropped up in the Mumbai camp. First of all Mumbai have still not found an able opening partner for tendulkar to relax and play the sheet anchor role while the other one mauls down the opposition. Davey Jacobs and Blizzard have not been consistent with the job. Another problem has been the dearth of early wickets when malinga doesn't perform. Bowlers like munaf patel and Bhajji have not done justice to their potentials. Also last year's orange cap Sachin tendulkar has also lost his orange cap to Marsh and slipped behind Valthaty and marsh in the scorer's list this year. While Pollard ans Symonds have still not given top notch performances consistently. Rayudu and Rohit are doing their bit but the team is not performing collectively as a unit since the last 3 matches.
While all is yet not over for Mumbai as they still have a match left which if they win, they will seal their spot in the play-offs and even if they lose they can still make it if Punjab lose today against Deccan which seems unlikely seeing Deccan's performances. But the problem for Mumbai is that they are up against a desperate-to-win Kolkata who are also in a similar state and are keen to book their place in the knock outs for the first time in 4 years. Mumbai peaked early but have recieved a few wake up calls. Lets see if the best team on paper of IPL 2011 is able to make it to the play-offs.
No comments:
Post a Comment