Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium: Mumbai Indians’ big-hitting batter Tim David said he was impressed with how his teammate Tilak Varma played on his way to making a superb 34-ball 64 at his home ground to keep the team in the hunt while chasing 278 against Sunrisers Hyderabad, though the visitors’ eventually fell short by 31 runs.At his home ground, Varma struck six sixes and two fours at a strike rate of 188.24 to add more to a run-fest of a match at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium.
“Tilak (Varma) played beautifully. Hitting the ball cleanly is close to the best of what Tilak’s got. I say that because I still think he’s got more than that as well, and we saw a pretty special innings here. It’s always great to see your teammates playing well down the line; I have a lot of faith that it will result in wins for us,” said David in the post-match press conference.
David, who himself made a 22-ball 42 in MI’s unsuccessful chase, also revealed what the talk was in the dressing room at the halfway stage of the match. “The talk in our dressing room is that we believe in our batting unit. We chased down some high scores last year, which was sticking to our approach as you can’t look at the total itself.”
“It’s a process to get to that stage, and I think we were keeping up with the rate at a certain point. So, although we didn’t get the runs, it was a great batting performance from us, too,” he said.
David further believed the SRH bowlers, especially captain Pat Cummins and Jaydev Unadkat, did well in taking the pace off the deliveries at the fag end of the match, something which MI wasn’t able to do.
“It was a pretty true surface, wasn’t it? There wasn’t a lot of seam movement, and there wasn’t a lot of spin. We saw at the end when SRH took the pace off bowling to the pitch, and it seemed to be the hardest thing to hit.”
“I haven’t looked at the statistics, but I’m sure they did that more than we did, and it was harder to hit. Yes, that could’ve been the first 200 games. You’ve got to be good to get into the IPL and play on a team, and we saw some pretty special performances at the ground.”
He also appreciated the SRH batting trio of Travis Head, Abhishek Sharma, and Heinrich Klaasen for raining boundaries on the way to notching up their respective fifties. “In our (bowling) innings there were a lot of sixes that kind of hit the advertising boards just behind the ropes.”
“It felt like they could have gone to hand. When I was fielding maybe three went over my head and I thought I was catching them the whole time until they went over. So that’s hard as a bowler, you’ve got to come back and bowl the next ball,” pointed out Tim David. “They played some amazing shots. So, you have to give credit to their batsmen for putting that much pressure on any bowler. There’s not much to do to stop them if they’re going to play good shots. Sometimes it’s execution (from the bowlers) but you’ve got to take your hat off when someone plays well.”
With this defeat to SRH, MI have now lost two matches in a row and will aim to get off the mark on the points table this season when they take on IPL 2008 winners Rajasthan Royals (RR) at their home ground, the Wankhede Stadium, on April 1.
