IPL 2025: Mahela Jayawardene rues Mumbai Indians’ powerplay woes

Mumbai Indians head coach Mahela Jayawardene shared his concern regarding the franchise’s powerplay woes in the ongoing IPL 2025. MI suffered a 12-run loss against Royal Challengers Bengaluru at the Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai on Monday.

While RCB raced 73-1 in the Powerplay overs, which is their best first-six overs score against MI, the home team managed only 54-2 during the field restrictions.

MI former captain Rohit Sharma was dismissed after scoring only 17 whereas Ryan Rickelton was plumbed in front by Josh Hazlewood for the same score.

“The powerplay is a concern for us with the ball and the bat,” Mahela said after MI’s 12-run defeat. “In the last few games as well, we were leaking too many runs with the ball in the powerplay and we are not getting the starts and losing wickets [with the bat].

“We got an early wicket today as well and then they counterpunched, played good shots and we didn’t react well to that. These are the margins. And then they had the big sixth over [bowled by Deepak Chahar], which really hurt us. We didn’t close the powerplay properly. With the bat as well, I thought we had a good start but just couldn’t continue. We lost those two wickets and then we had to consolidate a little bit and lost a bit of momentum there. We had a few big overs in between even in the powerplay but we weren’t in the game in that first 10 overs [during the chase].

“So the margins are small in this competition and we are not hitting our strides and that’s a concern. We are playing good cricket, but not good enough.”

Meanwhile, MI conceded 69 runs against LSG in the first six overs and Deepak Chahar is conceding his runs at an economy rate of 11.30 during the Powerplay.

Jayawardene reckons they were up to the mark with the ball against RCB.

“I don’t think chasing was the wrong decision, where we went wrong was with our execution with the ball where we could have controlled things much better,” Mahela said. “I think we got two swing bowlers, we need to give them that opportunity first up and Booms [Jasprit Bumrah] was coming back from a three month layoff as well, so we just wanted to ease him into the competition.

“We need to understand that the skills were brilliant but there are areas for us to improve.”

Mumbai Indians will next take on Delhi Capitals at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi on Sunday.