It is hard to stay motivated when your campaign is already over and the league still drags on, but Mumbai Indians are trying. Knocked out of the IPL play-off race back on 8 May, they still have a handful of fixtures to fulfil and, as assistant coach Paras Mhambrey keeps repeating, “playing quality 40 hours of cricket” is about all they can control.
“Our preparation is simple: look at winning the games. That’s what we’ve been doing,” he said after Wednesday night’s defeat to Kolkata Knight Riders, Mumbai’s ninth in 13 outings. “The focus on this game, as well as earlier games, is winning. And we want to look back and say: how do you work around constructing a team, what are the things that we need to learn from this game and take it to the next game, which allows us to win a game?”
A victory against KKR would not have revived their season, yet Mhambrey knows it could have muddied the table for everyone else. “I know, with the way things have balanced out, a win [against KKR] would have set the cat amongst the pigeons. I know that. But we can only control what we can control. And what we can control is going out there and playing quality 40 hours of cricket and winning the game and leave the results or the positions in the table for someone else to look into.”
That clarity is useful, because not much else has been. Mumbai have mis-fired with bat and ball, and their fielding – usually solid – has wobbled. Wednesday produced two more awkward moments, both featuring Deepak Chahar.
First, in the tenth over of KKR’s chase, Rovman Powell top-edged a pull to the leg-side deep. Chahar, sprinting from fine leg, and Robin Minz, coming in from square, closed in. Minz appeared to give it up early, leaving Chahar seemingly set, yet he stopped dead, hands cupped, and the ball plopped between them. It was untidy more than disastrous, but those moments linger when you are losing.
Eighteen overs in, Chahar was again centre-stage. Tejasvi Dahiya’s scoop ballooned towards short fine. Ryan Rickelton tore off from behind the stumps, Chahar charged from the deep, nobody called, and they almost collided. Rickelton avoided the clash; Chahar jammed a knee into the turf and wore the sheepish smile that follows a near-mess.
“No one does it on purpose. You drop catches. It just happens, part of the game,” Mhambrey reminded. “Not something that we’re going to dwell too much on, honestly. Yes, if you look at it in hindsight and say, ‘okay, fine, that catch [Powell] at that stage would have been 15, 20 runs extra’, yeah. But I’m not going to blame anyone out here. If you look at Corbin [Bosch], he took a brilliant catch [at point, to send back Powell off AM Ghazanfar]. So you compensate it for that, right?”
Statistically, Mumbai are not the league’s worst in the cordon. Independent ball-by-ball data has them on 14 drops, behind Punjab Kings’ far more generous tally. The problem is that every MI error lately feels magnified because there is nothing else – no push for qualification – to direct the conversation.
And so the remaining fixtures become a curious mix of audition and pride. Senior players must keep bodies and reputations intact; fringe names look for one telling contribution that might nudge them up the pecking order for 2027. Coaches gather information: which combinations work, who fields where, who finishes an innings. It is cricket’s version of tidying the shed once the season’s trophies have gone elsewhere.
From outside the dressing-room, the mood looks flat. Inside, Mhambrey insists, it is practical. “You can’t switch off,” he said. “There’s still a responsibility: the fans who turn up, the badge you wear, and frankly your own standards. The table may say we’re done, but if you’re a professional you turn up and do the job properly.”
A brief word on the surface: former India opener Abhinav Mukund, on television duties, reckoned “this pitch suited someone like Pandey.” Hard to argue – Manish Pandey’s run-a-ball 47 guided KKR through a mildly tricky period and left Mumbai chasing ghosts again. Wasim Jaffer, next to him, nodded, adding that the wicket “held a bit of pace but rewarded the batter who waited”.
That, ultimately, is what Mumbai have not done enough of this year: wait, assess, execute. They have three matches to show they still remember how. In a season already filed under ‘learning’, that would at least be something worth carrying into next April.
