Mumbai : Mumbai Indians defeated Gujarat Titans by 5 runs at the Brabourne Stadium on Friday. Chasing 178, Gujarat Titans were 106 for 1 at one stage but then they lost their way down the order as MI, five-time IPL champions, bounced back sensationally to seal the victory.
Tim David, Player of the Match, said, ‘ Given the context, us winning the game, it feels great. It was a good batting wicket, I missed out on a few scoring opportunities in the last over. Shows how well our bowlers bowled in the second half to get us over the line. The wicket was slightly two-paced, it’s about starting your innings, if you get off to a flier then you just run with it. It’s great to be on the winning side. It’s tough when you are sitting off the field, especially watching your team-mates not get the result. Try as hard as you can in the nets and be ready when the opportunity comes.’
Rohit Sharma, winning captain, said, ‘ It was pretty tight towards the back end. Very satisfying, something we were looking for all this while. Luck has to turn at some stage, we’ll take that win with both hands. Credit to everyone. We were 15-20 runs short. The way we started, we got stuck in the middle. They bowled well in that situation.
Tim David finished things really well. We knew it would be tough, but we held our nerves and that was good to see. A lot depends on how the game is going, who’s bowling well on the day. Luckily I had few resources so I could change-up. They bowled slower balls and it was difficult to hit. We wanted to do the same. We did that pretty well, it was a great effort from the bowling unit. We didn’t want to look too far ahead.
Even today, we didn’t play our best cricket, a lot of credit to the bowlers at the back-end. It’s important to back the skills you have. Sams was under the pump in a couple of games but I know the quality he has. It’s important to back those guys. We are trying to maintain the same squad how much ever possible. Daniel Sams was brilliant.’
Hardik Pandya, losing captain, said, ‘We’ll take 9 runs in the last over on any given day, but the two run-outs didn’t help us. In T20 cricket you can’t keep losing back-to-back wickets, it pushes you back. It’s one of the games where we ended on the losing side.
We kind of played 19.2 or 19.3 overs of good cricket, but losing wickets didn’t help us like I said before. At one point I thought they would post more than 200, but our bowlers did well to restrict them.’