Beyond the Boundary: Mumbai in the mood but Pune set to resist

When Rising Pune Supergiant hosted Mumbai Indians for the first match of their 2017 season, nothing was at stake for either team. A win or a loss just didn’t matter as there was plenty of time to catch up with each other and the rest of the teams. When both teams meet again on Sunday, it’s exactly half-way stage for one team (Pune) and the right beginning to the second half for the other (Mumbai).
While the Rohit Sharma-led Mumbai Indians went on to win all of their next six games to put themselves right on top of the table, Steve Smith-led Pune struggled all along. If the loss didn’t matter for Mumbai, the win actually threw Pune into a bit of a mess as reckless tweets by Harsh Goenka, the brother of the owner of the franchise who sought to put a fresh coat of gloss on Smith through unwise comparisons, got even their supporters up in arms against the team.
At the end of their last match, which was against Sunrisers Hyderabad, on Saturday, Pune sneaked into the top four, and even Harsh had nice words to tweet about MS Dhoni. In the moment of excitement after the dumped former skipper drove the ball to the boundary to snatch a last-ball win, Goenka seemed to have stumbled on a gem that “nobody can be a greater finisher,” which was good to hear, but he would have to handle his Twitter handle with care. Let the team have greater finishers other than Dhoni, that’s no problem, but let’s not use one to denounce another.
So, how good was that last-ball extra-cover drive? There could still be people trying to stress their point that it was not the way they had expected Dhoni to finish it. They could say Dhoni should have done it off the third ball in the last over when exactly six runs were needed. But folks, this is the way Dhoni has always done it. Easy things are first made to look difficult and then impossible before everything is settled with a couple of amazing shots right in the end.
After Dhoni walked out to bat at the fall of Smith and successfully dealt with the last ball of the over from Rashid Khan, Pune needed exactly 10 runs an over in the next nine overs which, at that stage and with eight wickets in hand, was the normal script for a story to make its boring progress to a predictable conclusion. Instead, the plot thickened in the next few overs and the tempo was carefully manipulated to build on the excitement.
The required run rate kept rising: From 10 an over it steadily climbed to 15.66 between overs 12 and 17, and then the fall, ever so gradual, to keep the interest tight. The 18th over needed to produce just enough to keep the mystery alive: too little or too much would have doomed the plot. The 17 runs did the trick and got the balance right, and we then had two overs and 30 runs. The rest is history. Seeing it all happening one more time after such a big gap of time was awesome.
Dhoni may be able to do it again, the misfiring Pune middle order may come good against Mumbai Indians today but unless they improve their death bowling, a spot in the playoff might look difficult for the giants. When it looked a 160-165 runs wicket at the start of the game, and everything happened to reinforce the prediction until the end of the 15th over with Sunrisers posting just 113 on the scoreboard, the Pune bowlers allowed the rivals to march to a respectable total of 176.
Apart from Imran Tahir they don’t have anyone capable of putting the brakes on the opposition. Smith and Co need to come up with strategies keeping an eye on their soft underbelly, especially against Mumbai Indians who successfully chased nearly 200 runs inside 15.3 overs and defended a low score of 142 in back-to-back games.
Mitchell McClenaghan said after their match against Delhi Daredevils on Saturday that they were not arrogant but only confident, and it seems he was trying to be kind towards other teams who might now be getting a scary picture of Mumbai Indians. The timing of the McClenaghan statement—just ahead of the Mumbai match against the only team that have done them in so far—may be pure coincidence, but the irony is that Pune are in no position to either test or trifle with the Mumbai mood. Who would have imagined such mood swings to have set in so quickly as the dust began to settle down on the night of April 6?