Sunday’s narrow defeat to Royal Challengers Bengaluru confirmed what many Mumbai Indians followers had begun to fear: the five-time champions are out of the IPL 2026 play-off race and are staring at a scrap to avoid the wooden spoon. Three league matches remain; the margin for error has gone.
Head coach Mahela Jayawardene fronted up afterwards, his mood restrained but honest. “Yeah, I mean, the season, it’s disappointing,” he said moments after the two-wicket loss, Mumbai’s eighth in 11 outings. “We’ve had our opportunities. We were not good enough. We were not consistent enough with the ball, with the bat, and that showed the margins.”
The match itself hinged on a final-over punt. With all recognised bowlers used, Suryakumar Yadav turned to Raj Angad Bawa, the 24-year-old all-rounder who – remarkably – had never bowled an IPL over despite being in his fourth season. The first ball was a wide, the second a no-ball. A wicket – Romario Shepherd – briefly lifted hopes, but another wide and a straight-hit six from Bhuvneshwar Kumar tipped the contest RCB’s way.
Jayawardene explained the call. “All our bowlers were finished at that time, we didn’t have anyone left, any experienced bowler,” he said. “We had couple of spinners [Will Jacks and AM Ghazanfar]; one was Raghu Sharma who hadn’t bowled. The other one option probably would have been Allah [Ghazanfar].
“Allah also went for runs. I think Suryakumar [Yadav] backed [Bawa]. Raj is a decent bowler. We know what he can do in practice, executing yorkers, the wide stuff and all that. So this is the situation that we thought he should be able to. I thought he bowled well to Shepherd, got the wicket as well, bowled those lines.
“Yeah, I mean, couple of wides, no-ball, it’s under pressure for him as well, so we had to look at it. But I think I was pleased the way we fought. And yeah, I mean, it was a game of margins, we probably should have executed a bit better at the end.”
The bigger picture, Jayawardene conceded, is a campaign dotted with similar mis-steps. “We were probably two-three wins away from being in the same group of contenders to get into that playoff. But we didn’t get those wins and today was another classic example that we were short.”
There have also been lean returns from two senior stars, Suryakumar Yadav and Hardik Pandya, fresh from a World Cup triumph but short of form in blue and gold. “We went with the trust, the confidence that we had with them. And then it is what it is. Like I said, it’s difficult for me to go beyond that. They had a really good World Cup, winning it and all that. So I think it’s just that as a unit, we haven’t been good enough.”
The uneven Raipur surface was mentioned as one possible factor – low bounce early, skiddier later – yet Mumbai’s issues clearly run deeper. Their power-play wickets have dried up, death-over economy has ballooned, and the middle order has too often left the back-end hitters with far too much to do. These are fixable, but only with personnel available. “I would have loved to have our main core guys consistently being out there,” Jayawardene admitted, a nod to Jasprit Bumrah’s lingering back niggle and Tim David’s stop-start season.
Still, the coach sees value in the remaining fixtures. Younger bowlers such as Bawa and Kuldeep Sen can bank overs, and a couple of good outings would at least stave off the bottom-place chatter that has trailed Mumbai since April. Avoiding that tag, Jayawardene hinted, would be small consolation but consolation all the same.
Fans will hope the next fortnight brings signs of renewal; the management, one suspects, are already sketching plans for the 2027 auction. There is, after all, little mystery about where Mumbai fell short – only the harder task of preventing it happening again.
