LSG vs MI, IPL 2022 Highlights: Rahul century, LSG bowlers send MI hurtling to eighth consecutive defeat

It has been three years since MI have played at the stadium that is usually their home in the IPL. It is also their spiritual leader Tendulkar's birthday and even Sunil Gavaskar is at the stadium as a pundit. All the stars have aligned for an MI win today in a non-cricketing sense but none of it would matter of course if they cannot outsmart LSG in the field. 

KL Rahul: The last few games that we watched and the last few games that we played, there hasn't been a lot of dew. The toss doesn't play a part if there's no dew. We just need to be smarter with our plans. We haven't lost by big margins, it has just been small things. Hopefully we can come out here and do better. Avesh Khan misses out due to a niggle and Mohsin Khan replaces him. We got a couple of wickets in the first over in the last game but still gave away 50 runs in the powerplay. So it's just those small things that we need to correct.

Rohit Sharma: Feels good to be back here. It has been a while since we played here, and we are expecting a lot of noise. Our winning record here was with a different team. We now need to play better now. We're bowling first. We have played a lot of cricket here to understand that it is a chasing ground. Good pitch, decent boundaries, and we back ourselves to chase anything down. We're playing the same team.

Quinton de Kock (wicketkeeper), KL Rahul (captain), Manish Pandey, Krunal Pandya, Deepak Hooda, Ayush Badoni, Marcus Stoinis, Jason Holder, Dushmantha Chameera, Ravi Bishnoi, Mohsin Khan

Rohit Sharma (captain), Ishan Kishan (wicketkeeper), Dewald Brevis, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Varma, Kieron Pollard, Hrithik Shokeen, Daniel Sams, Jaydev Unadkat, Riley Meredith, Jasprit Bumrah

Mumbai Indians win the toss, choose to bowl first at a very, very loud Wankhede Stadium. A sign of good things for MI? 

Matthew Hayden says that he is confused by the pitch that is on offer at the Wankhede Stadium. “I'm a little confused with this surface. Every time it looks wonderful with a nice covering of grass, but the scores have been up and down. It looks a very good batting track.”

LSG won't be interested in changing things too much and could play with an unchanged XI despite the fact that they lost to the Royal Challengers Bangalore in their previous match. 

Don't be surprised if MI decide to experiment with their lineup, even bring in the likes of Mayank Markande. They could give Tim David another chance and Pollard may have to make way for him. 

Teams batting first have won matches four times and lost on six occasions at the Wankhede Stadium this season. It seems winning toss and bowling first will be the way to go yet again. 

Ravi Shastri feels that the race for the Orange Cap this season will be between Rahul and Buttler. For now, though, it doesn't look like Buttler has any competition. He has scored 491 in seven matches at a strike rate of over 161 with a whopping three centuries to his name. Incredibly, it is Hardik Pandya who is second and he has scored 295 runs. Rahul has 265 to his name in seven innings at a strike rate of 141.71 and he is third. 

The Little Master celebrates his 50th birthday today and a win could be a nice gift for MI to give their former captain. 

There are three teams on 10 points and three more on six and so it is a ridiculous task to analyse the overall look of the top-four race. For Lucknow, who are the only team on the entire table on eight points, a win today would take them at least one place higher to fourth. They can go higher, all the way to second depending on the nature of their win today as it is only net run rate that would separate the teams placed second, third, fourth and fifth at that point. MI are currently rock bottom at 10th place and a win today would leave them at…. 10th place. 

Kevin Pietersen was all praise talking about KL Rahul on Star Sports. "He's such a dynamic player and that's going to bear the fruit of his success for many a year. To continue scoring runs for different franchises is a damn hard (thing) to do because there's so much pressure going into these new franchises. There's so much pressure on you when you get bought for such big money. But when you have technique as solid as his, you've got a mindset as good as his, and you're calm as much as he's calm. And you can hear that in the way he talks to us. His presence of mind is so calm. He's matured way beyond his age. He'll just be proud of what he does and he'll have to continue to make sure that he focuses on his job because captaincy aside, franchise aside, his team does well when he's scored big runs."

The wicketkeeper-batsman, who was the most expensive buy of the 2022 auction, scored 135 runs in his first two matches this season at a strike rate of 148.35. Since then, has scored only 56 runs in the next five games at a strike rate of 76.71.

Suryakumar would become the fifth batsman to reach 2000 runs for Mumbai Indians. He missed the first two matches of this season but has been in impressive form since coming in, which has gone almost entirely in vain as far as MI's results are concerned. 

Rahul needs five more sixes to complete 150 sixes in the IPL and seven more to complete 250 sixes in his T20 career. He has scored 764 runs against MI and needs 108 more to become the leading run scorer in the IPL against the five-time champions.

Kieron Pollard, who is now the former West Indies captain after his abrupt international retirement last week, has a strike rate of of 86.36, which is the lowest for him in any IPL season. 

MI's Director of Cricket Operations Zaheer Khan made it clear that he has faith in this team to stack up wins. "When you speak about the squad and how they are looking, in terms of preparation and in terms of what their capabilities are, I have full faith in the squad. That's how I look at it. It's a team, we are going to back each other through and through. I would say this squad is definitely capable of stacking up wins together, and that's what I want to see in the remainder of the season, and that's what we will be looking to achieve. Having said that, you don't want to look too far ahead. You just want to look at every game, one game at a time," he told reporters. 

Rohit Sharma(c), Ishan Kishan(w), Dewald Brevis, Suryakumar Yadav, Tilak Varma, Kieron Pollard, Hrithik Shokeen, Daniel Sams, Jaydev Unadkat, Riley Meredith, Jasprit Bumrah, Fabian Allen, Murugan Ashwin, Tymal Mills, Basil Thampi, Anmolpreet Singh, Sanjay Yadav, Tim David, Ramandeep Singh, Mayank Markande, Aryan Juyal, Arjun Tendulkar, Rahul Buddhi, Arshad Khan

Quinton de Kock(w), KL Rahul(c), Manish Pandey, Krunal Pandya, Deepak Hooda, Ayush Badoni, Marcus Stoinis, Jason Holder, Dushmantha Chameera, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan, Manan Vohra, Kyle Mayers, Evin Lewis, Ankit Rajpoot, Krishnappa Gowtham, Shahbaz Nadeem, Andrew Tye, Mohsin Khan, Karan Sharma, Mayank Yadav

We have come to expect great things from KL Rahul and he has thus far lived up to that billing this season. In the last match played between these two teams this season, Rahul became the second player after ton-machine Jos Buttler to score a century this season. The LSG opener remained unbeaten having blazed 103 runs in just 60 deliveries which pretty much took the game away from MI despite the fact that LSG were batting first. 

After two brilliant seasons in the IPL, 2022 seems to be the sobering poor season that any player is bound to have for Ravi Bishnoi. He has taken just five wickets this season and his average of 97.00 in second innings of matches is the second worst by any bowler this year. However, he has been effective against Suryakumar Yadav, who has emerged as a rock in MI's floundering batting lineup this year, having dismissed him in three of the four matches that Bishnoi has played against MI. 

MI's fast bowling pairing of Trent Boult and Jasprit Bumrah were almost unplayable in the 2020 season, which was the last time they won the title. This year, there is no Boult in the squad and Bumrah has struggled to find an able partner. The MI bowlers have picked a total of 36 wickets this season at an average of 9.12, which is the worst among all the teams.

Another bright spark is their highest run scorer Tilak Varma. The 19-year-old, who plays for Hyderabad in the domestic circuit, has scored 234 runs at a strike rate of 140.11 in the seven innings he has played thus far.