Mumbai is the most successful team in the history of the Ranji Trophy competition, but things have not gone their way this season. While they got the better of Baroda in their opening game of the season, they lost the other two back to back, to Railways and Karnataka respectively. They thus have a lot of work to do in the remainder of their league games.
Their batting, surprisingly, has been pale, despite them boasting of some of the best batsmen in the tournament. Captain Suryakumar Yadav has been the only good performer with the bat so far. He was quick to point out that things have not gone as planned for Mumbai.
“Like against Railways, we failed to score big due to lack of application. We could have done better in all departments. We failed as a unit. Maybe in the first innings, we could have batted better and got a 20-run lead and in the second got those extra 50 runs,” he said.
“I feel Mumbai versus Karnataka is always a tough encounter which we saw today. We were short by 50-70 runs, otherwise, it would have been a close game,” he added.
In the last two games against Karnataka and Railways, the team’s top batsman – Ajinkya Rahane, Aditya Tare, and Siddhesh Lad have all failed to perform well.
Yadav will be missing Mumbai’s next three games as he is heading for the tour of New Zealand with India ‘A’
“It’s a difficult situation to address but it’s just the third game. Looking at history, we have always come back stronger and we will come back stronger,” he said.
Yadav also said the team needs to sit and find out ways to address the failure of the top order. “It has happened in successive games. We will have to sit and see what is going wrong,” he said, adding: “We always love winning home games but we won our away game and we will take that positive.”
