Ranji Trophy: Time to introspect, says skipper Suryakumar Yadav

MUMBAI: Mumbai find themselves in an unenviable position after the conclusion of their third Ranji Trophy game this season. While they beat Baroda in the opening encounter, defeat to Railways at the Wankhede last week and the five-wicket loss to Karnataka at the BKC on Sunday, leaves them with a mountain to climb in the remaining five league games.
Their batting is a pale shadow of the dominance they’ve enjoyed over the past several decades, and only something extraordinary can help them make further inroads in the tournament from here.
Skipper Suryakumar Yadav, who has been the team’s only bright spot with the bat this season, acknowledged their shortcomings after the game on Sunday. “Like against Railways, we failed to score big due to lack of application. We could have done better in all departments. We failed as a unit. Maybe in the first innings, we could have batted better and got a 20-run lead and in the second got those extra 50 runs,” he said.
“I feel Mumbai versus Karnataka is always a tough encounter which we saw today. We were short by 50-70 runs, otherwise it would have been a close game,” he added.
The team’s senior batsmen including Ajinkya Rahane, Siddhesh Lad and Aditya Tare, failed to deliver in back-to-back games against Railways and Karnataka, but Yadav, who is headed for New Zealand as part of the India A squad and will miss Mumbai’s next three games, is confident that the team will stage a fightback.
“It’s a difficult situation to address but it’s just the third game. Looking at history, we have always come back stronger and we will come back stronger,” he said.
Yadav also conceded that the team needs to sit and find out ways to address the repeated top-order failure. “It has happened in successive games. We will have to sit and see what is going wrong,” he said, adding: “We always love winning home games but we won our away game and we will take that positive.”
Talking about the shoulder injury to Prithvi Shaw, which prevented him from batting in the second innings, Yadav revealed that the opener wanted to bat, but the team management thought it would be better if they do not risk him. “Prithvi was experiencing a lot of pain in the shoulder but he requested me and the coach whether he could bat. We found that it was very difficult for him to do so,” Yadav said.