MI contemplate loss after underbowling Hardik and Santner after both bowlers bowled just four overs combined.
Underbowling Hardik and Mitchell Santner in the Qualifier 2 means MI contemplate loss to the Punjab Kings that brings their IPL to an end.
The Punjab Kings (PBKS) chased until the final over, but the Mumbai Indians’ (MI) 203 was ultimately insufficient. And it might have resulted from a few poor decisions made by Hardik Pandya and the MI mind tank during crucial IPL 2025 Qualifier 2 moments. What prevented Hardik from bowling more than the two overs that he did? Mitchell Santner only bowled two overs; why? Reece Topley bowled the thirteenth over, but why?
All of this is obviously in retrospect, and although it may have made sense to keep Santner out of the game because spin-destroyer Shreyas Iyer was batting, Hardik’s decision to not bowl after the tenth was puzzling.
“First of all, Hardik, Santner and [Jasprit] Bumrah were going to be the three main bowlers, who had to bowl 12 overs together,” Varun Aaron said on ESPNcricinfo’s Time Out show. “But Hardik and Santner have just bowled two overs each. I don’t know why Hardik didn’t bowl four overs in this game. This wicket, he has bowled so much on this wicket playing for GT, he had to bowl four overs.”
“He looked very difficult to get away, especially in his first over,” Aaron said. “Yeah, he went for a few in his second, but he should have still persevered because his plans were right, and he executed them really well: back of length, bouncers, slower bouncers…”
Santner’s economy rate of 7.92 concluded a high-scoring IPL 2025. His two overs on Sunday night yielded 15 runs. He stopped bowling. Santner has an adverse matchup because Iyer is a fantastic spin hitter and Wadhera, the other batsman for a significant portion of the chase (they contributed 84 for the fourth wicket), is a left-hander. Still, though…
“I mean, you can look at it in different ways. I think Hardik looked at it because we knew that there were a couple of match-ups against Nehal and he didn’t want to get the game away from him,” Mahela Jayawardene, the MI head coach, said at the press conference after the game. “Then after that just the game went away from him because they had those two big overs [the 14th, from Boult, went for 14 runs]. After that he was a bit hesitant to bring Mitch back again.
“There’s lots of ifs and buts – we could have done this, we could have done that – but I think when we executed those things in the past, it has worked for us and gone our way and today it didn’t. So I think the game is such that you have to make some decisions and sometimes it goes, sometimes it doesn’t, so we will reflect on that, have a debrief.”