Mumbai look to finish on a high

[1]

Amid the anger, sorrow and disbelief caused by Thursday’s events in Mumbai and Delhi, the cricket goes on and in Saturday’s afternoon game, Kings XI Punjab and the Mumbai Indians meet in their final IPL-6 league outing at the HPCA Stadium here.
Attention is largely focused more on the fallout of S. Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan’s arrests. Equally, there are questions over how cricket administrators will act to check further pollution of the game, for this cannot have been an isolated incident.
Quite naturally, therefore, cricket has been forced off centre-stage. And both teams here, as well as elsewhere in the competition, will have to put the recent happenings on the back-burner going into endgame of the cash-rich league.
While Mumbai are certain to finish in the top two, the Kings XI have much more at stake, and their fate could still be decided elsewhere. Sunrisers Hyderabad and the Royal Challengers Bangalore are better placed than the Punjab side, and the best Adam Gilchrist’s men can do is focus on trying to topple the star-studded Mumbai team.
Matched man for man, these two teams are not even on the same page. MI are often an overwhelming outfit and are looking increasingly competitive as the business end of the tournament nears. Rohit Sharma has grown as a batsman since being handed captaincy duties and is proving to be a more than capable leader.
He commands an impressive array of talent. Among MI’s bowlers, Mitchell Johnson may have had a forgettable tour of India on Aussie Test duty but has blossomed into an incisive strike bowler with just four overs to deal with.
Lasith Malinga is another who will enjoy the pace and carry at the HPCA Stadium deck affords while Dhawal Kulkarni and Harbhajan Singh are good support acts. The batting, with the power of Kieron Pollard anchoring the increasingly important death overs, can unsettle the best of attacks.
Against these riches, Gilchrist, much like Rahul Dravid of the Rajasthan Royals, commands at best a modest assembly of talent. Yet, as they showed against RCB twice over in this season itself, the Kings XI can turn up the heat quite effectively on occasion.
With the boundaries at this venue being on the shorter side, bowlers on either side will have to be at their smartest best in trying to keep the runs down. Thursday’s game with the Delhi Daredevils was a good example of how lack of pace can tie batsmen down, and the Punjab unit will have picked up valuable lessons on keeping free-flowing batters in check.
And then, there are Gilchrist himself, backed up by David Miller. The veteran Aussie is finally amongst the runs, blasting his way to a 26-ball 42 on Thursday before ‘Killer’ Miller took over in the end overs.
Kings XI coach Darren Lehmann will be praying fervently that both his aces – with some help from the rest – can net enough runs to trip up the Mumbai Indians, for pressure can often be a strange beast.