MI vs RR Match Highlights:
RR 158/6 (20)
MI 161/5 (19.2)
Mumbai Indians won by 5 wkts
MI vs RR PLAYER OF THE MATCH– Suryakumar Yadav
The moment for which Mumbai fans have been waiting is finally here. Mumbai Indians have won their first match of the tournament in their 9th outing in IPL 2022. They beat Rajasthan Royal convincingly by 5 wickets. The match being played at MCA Stadium Pune was predominantly led by bowlers and surprisingly Mumbai bowlers were excellent today. They restricted Rajasthan’s bowlers from hitting big shots and apart from Jos Buttler and Ashwin, everyone else seemed to struggle from their side. Mumbai bowled at good line and length and looked disciplined as a side that focused on winning, which was a good change we saw in this match. Credits to Riley Meridith who bowled exceptionally well, economical overs, and got wickets at crucial points.
Rajasthan had a bad day today. They batted poorly and were too redundant with the ball. They followed the same formula and couldn’t come up with anything new to challenge batters like SKY who are well aware of pitch and batting conditions as he has played a good amount of cricket at MCA. They might have stretched the game till the last over but their economical bowling was not going to win them matches. Rather they should have taken wickets early on to build pressure on the opposition. Mumbai played better cricket today and so they won the match. The fans must be hoping for this to win to have come sooner.
The losing captain Sanju Samson had a breakdown of want went wrong for his team, as he shared “I think we could have scored a few more runs. The dew came in and it was hard to bowl. It was getting wet. The ball was getting wet so that’s why they changed the ball. Different venues are playing in different ways. Here, batting first was a bit tougher, the ball was a bit two-paced. I think batting second was much better. It depends on the wicket you are playing on.”
Rohit Sharma, the winning captain, also the birthday boy looked happy as his team finally broke the bad luck charm and spoke about the victory looked natural to the team as he said “ I’d definitely take it, that’s how we play, real potential came out today, with the ball specially. They kept applying the pressure. If you keep taking wickets, it’s going to be difficult for them, we did that perfectly today. This is the team we played in the first couple of games except few bowling changes. When you have a season like that, you are not sure of your combination. You want to try out so many things. The conditions are different. The ball tends to grip here, the pitches are flat in the other venues. We try and field the best combination, it hasn’t worked for eight games. But one thing I can say is, we were not blown away by the opposition, we came really close. Had we won those games, things would have been slightly different. Both of these guys, they are courageous, they want to do something special. It gives me the confidence to bowl them at any given stage. We played very well, bowlers came together, batters did the job as well.”
