IPL face-off today: Punjab Kings, Mumbai Indians eye victory at Mullanpur

Deepankar Sharda

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Mohali, April 17

After losing two consecutive matches, Punjab Kings and Mumbai Indians will be eagerly looking forward to release some pressure with a convincing win during their face-off at Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium, Mullanpur, tomorrow.

The two teams are currently positioned in the bottom zone of the points table. While Mumbai Indians logged two wins from their five outings, Punjab Kings has only one in their last five encounters of the IPL.

Only a few decimal points separate the two teams as Punjab perform marginally better net run rate of -0.218 at the seventh spot, above Mumbai Indians (-0.234). Both Punjab and Mumbai have lost four matches each.

In the match tomorrow, Punjab will be playing without Shikhar Dhawan and the challenge will be to get the best from their top-order. The only bright spot for Punjab so far is performance of their middle-order batters — Shashank Singh and Ashutosh Sharma. While a lot depends on Shashank and Sharma, the performance of Jitesh Sharma and promising Prabhsimran Singh, who are yet to play true to their potential, is also a concern for the side.

The Punjab management is likely to take a call on make some changes in their match against Mumbai Indians. The bowling duo of Sam Curran and Kagiso Rabada and the Indian pair of Arshdeep Singh and Harshal Patel have both been easy targets for batters.

On the other hand, Mumbai Indians will also be eyeing for a firepower performance from their batters. The two wins at home against Delhi Capitals and Royal Challengers Bengaluru ended their three-match losing run, but a loss to Chennai Super Kings despite Rohit Sharma’s century pushed them to bottom of the points table. Considering the ground conditions, the Mumbai Indians batters will surely have an upper hand over the hosts as the likes of Rohit, Ishan Kishan and Suryakumar Yadav are known for big hits.

It will be interesting to see if the newly appointed Mumbai Indians captain Hardik Pandya would draw some support from the crowd at Mullanpur.