Some of the most fancied international cricket players grace the line up of the Mumbai Indians and also the most expensive. However this was not enough to give Nita Ambani the thrill of seeing her team going on to the semi final berth in the DLF IPL 2009. While the other teams are still in the reckoning, the Mumbai team is the only one apart from the jinxed Kolkata Knight Riders team to be officially out of the competition.

Injury did of course upset the strategies of the Mumbai Indians but it was the poor showing form some of their best players that did them in. Zaheer Khan and Shikhar Dhawan’s injuries notwithstanding, there was no real problem of bad luck that the team had to face. The troubles started at the top, with Sanath (Jayasuriya) and Sachin, who, after a short initial burst simply seemed to run out of steam.

J P Duminy looked like the only mainstay of a team that boasts the who’s who of international cricket. Several permutations and combinations were tried, batting orders were juggled but it was the crunch moments that did them in. Witness their loss at the hands of the Rajasthan Royals, wherein the record books will show that Mumbai lost by 2 runs but what a last over that was that decided their fate: it was just 4 needed off the last over with three wickets in hand and the team would still be wondering how they managed to lose from there!

A naturally crestfallen Tendulkar admitted as much when he spoke in the cricket news saying that once the team’s batting momentum was broken by a 7 day break, things seemed to start going wrong: the fielding standards slipped, catches were dropped and wides conceded. The team ended up losing the crunch moments.

Sachin who always plays to win, and believes that though his teammates gave their best, the team has lost. When asked if he thought the team lacked sufficient good domestic cricket players, he said that the players were good enough but were not able to contribute as much as they should have. He accepted that plans do often go awry and there is really no way of ensuring that a given plan will in fact work.

As for Sachin’s captaincy, he said that it was a challenge that he took up and enjoyed every moment of. “It would have been good if we had won, but then again, everything doesn’t go according to script. That’s life and you’ve to accept that,” he was reported as having said in the cricket news.

So for the legions of Mumbai Indians' fans (many of them in South Africa), it is sad indeed that their team could not make it in the DLF IPL 2009; it will perhaps be better luck next time….

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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