Mumbai Indians captain Hardik Pandya was at a loss for words following his team’s crushing defeat by Punjab Kings in the 2026 Indian Premier League (IPL) at the Wankhede Stadium on Thursday night.
And you really can’t blame him for being speechless. His premier bowler Jasprit Bumrah has now gone five matches without taking a single wicket. Can you believe that? Then, to make things worse, his economy rate has gone up with every passing match. Against PBKS, he returned figures of 0/41.
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Shardul Thakur, about whom Pandya had said in the lead-up to their season opener that he hoped that the bowler would end up spending the rest of his IPL cricketing days at the Mumbai franchise, didn’t give him any happiness either. Although he got the wicket of Shreyas Iyer, it was too late in the day. The match had slipped through already.
Rohit Sharma didn’t play on Thursday either on account of a hamstring injury he had picked up in the previous game against Royal Challengers Bengaluru, and he is likely to miss more matches. When it rains, it pours, to all intents and purposes!
All through the match, Pandya looked shocked. None of his plans was working. He himself struggled as a bowler as well as a batsman. Absolute mayhem in his mind.
After PBKS chased down 196 with seven wickets in hand and 21 balls to spare to go top of the table, Pandya couldn’t explain what exactly went wrong for his team. It was the fourth defeat for MI in five games. Come to think of it, they had won their season opener and ever since they have tasted nothing but defeats.
Pandya doesn’t know what to make of his team’s poor show!
“To be very honest, I don’t have much to say right now. I think we really need to go back to the drawing board and see where we are lacking. Is it individuals? Is it as a group? Is it planning? We’ll just figure it out and see what we can do next,” Pandya dismayed after the match.
“I think you need to give credit to them as well. In the second innings, the dew came, and it slightly got better, but having said that, they just out-batted us. They bowled better, they fielded better definitely, and that is why we lost,” he added.
Mumbai Indians now play Gujarat Titans on Monday, which means they have very little time to figure out what they need to do to return to winning ways. “I mean, we really need to see, do we need to make some difficult calls, or do we need to keep continuing and hope that we’ll turn things around. These are some hard questions which eventually we need to answer, and ownership has to be taken,” he concluded.