Mumbai captain Suryakumar Yadav was left acknowledging his team's shortcomings after going down consecutively against Railways and Karnataka since defeating Baroda in the opening round of the Ranji Trophy. This, leaving the domestic powerhouse with a herculean task of resurrecting the campaign in the next five games and seal one of the five knock-out spots available from the combined Elite Group. 

Read Also: Prithvi Shaw rushed to NCA for an assessment of his shoulder injury

"Like against Railways, we failed to score big (versus Karnataka also) due to lack of application," TOI quoted Yadav as saying. "We could have done better in all departments. We failed as a unit. Maybe in the first innings, we could have batted better and got a 20-run lead and in the second got those extra 50 runs."

"I feel Mumbai versus Karnataka is always a tough encounter which we saw today. We were short by 50-70 runs, otherwise it would have been a close game."

Things are only going to get more difficult with Yadav, the team's only bright spot this season, set to leave for India A duties in New Zealand and miss the next three Ranji games. "It’s a difficult situation to address but it’s just the third game. Looking at history, we have always come back stronger and we will come back stronger," he said. 

"It has happened in successive games. We will have to sit and see what is going wrong. We always love winning home games but we won our away game and we will take that positive."

Besides underperformance from some of the team's seniors like Ajinkya Rahane, what also didn't help the cause in the last game was the shoulder injury to Prithvi Shaw, preventing him from batting in the second innings. 

"Prithvi was experiencing a lot of pain in the shoulder but he requested me and the coach whether he could bat. We found that it was very difficult for him to do so," Yadav informed. 

Mumbai next plays Tamil Nadu in Chennai from January 11. 

(Inputs from TOI)