Mumbai Indians (MI) bowling coach Shane Bond on Friday (8th April) said that his side’s bowlers need to stick to their plans in pressure situations to turn things around in the ongoing IPL 2022.
Mumbai Indians are certainly not having the best of times in the ongoing IPL 15. The Rohit Sharma-led side has lost all the three matches they have played so far and is placed 9th on the points table.
It’s fair to say that MI’s bowling has let them down in all three games and the opposition has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. In their last outing against KKR, the five-time champions almost sealed the match but Pat Cummins blasted the joint-fastest fifty of the season to win the game for his side.
They are next slated to play Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) on Saturday (9th April) in Pune. The Rohit-led side would be eager to make a comeback and stake their claim in the tournament.
Speaking in a note shared by MI, Shane Bond said that the bowling unit needs to stick to the areas and plans they want to bowl in the pressure situations to turn things around.
“It’s a simple fix really. If we can stick to our plans and stick to the areas we want to bowl when the pressure is on, then I think you’ll see a turnaround,” Shane Bond said.
Bond said that they have been successful when they have executed their plans. He cited the example of Andre Russell and Venkatesh Iyer from KKR’s game to explain his comments. Adding that, one batter has taken the game away from them with his brutal cameos in three matches.
“As I said, I think we’ve seen that when we’ve executed our plans the way that we wanted to, we’ve been really successful. We saw it in the last game against Andre Russell.
“Venkatesh Iyer, we made him work really hard for a fifty and bowled really well to him. We’ve just had one player who’s come out in each game and hit 30-plus off sort of 10-11 balls which has taken the game away from us,” Shane Bond said.
Bond rued Mumbai Indians' inability to cease important moments. He said the team has been able to tackle "big players" as per plan but has failed to stop the run-flow whenever the match has hung in balance.
“It’s been a real mixed bag from us I suppose from a bowling unit. You look at the last game; the first ten overs were fantastic. We had a couple of overs that got away from us.
It’s been a little bit of a pattern for us, that we’ve done some really good stuff, we’ve taken out a number of the big players exactly how we thought we would but when the game’s been in the balance, we’ve gone for some overs of 20-plus. And when you go for overs of 20-plus, then you end up losing matches,” he said.
Bond urged MI bowlers to go back to the basics and execute their plans under pressure, especially at the death, which can make life hard for the opposition batters.
“So the message really from me is to go back to what are we trying to do against a certain type of player? If we execute those plans, then we make it as hard as we possibly can. The challenge for us is to do that when the pressure is on at the back end of the game, which we haven’t done so far,” he said.
(PTI inputs)
