Mumbai Indians head coach Mark Boucher said that crucial pacers Jasprit Bumrah and Jofra Archer’s injury made things difficult for the team in the IPL 2023. He agreed that if players are unable to recover from their injuries, they would be compelled to look elsewhere.
Mumbai’s IPL 2023 campaign came to an end on Friday, May 26 with a 62-run loss against the reigning champions Gujarat Titans in Qualifier 2. Due to a back ailment, lead pacer Bumrah was ruled out of the whole event. Archer played five games for MI before returning to England due to another episode of his elbow problems.
In the absence of Bumrah and Archer, Akash Madhwal (14 wickets) and Jason Behrendorff (14 wickets) played well. However, it appeared that the franchise lacked firepower in the fast bowling area on a regular basis.
Boucher discussed the significance of Bumrah and Archer’s absences at a post match news conference.
“In the bowling, you lose two of your stars in the bowling lineup, it’s going to create a couple of holes and we try to fix it up as best as possible. You know, hopefully, the guys can get over their injuries. If they can’t, then we might have to look at other places and there are so many things that we can talk about.”
“Not for me to start opening up a can of worms now, it would be stupid. I think it’s time to just sit back, reflect a bit, take the emotion out of it and make some good sound cricketing decisions once everything’s calmed down and once we understand the future of certain individuals and where they are from a fitness perspective.”
Bumrah’s performance in IPL
Bumrah made his debut for MI in the 2013 IPL. He has 145 wickets at an average of 23.30 and an economy rate of 7.39 in 120 matches.
“233 was a bit high” – MI coach
Despite the unavailability of key bowlers, Mumbai Indians performed admirably to go to the IPL 2023 playoffs. They even defeated Lucknow Super Giants in the Eliminator.
However, they were unable to defeat GT in Qualifier 2, falling in a chase of 234. When asked about the defeat, Boucher said that MI’s bowlers allowed Gujarat to collect far too many runs.
“Yes, 233 I thought was a bit high, to be fair. Probably 25 to 30 runs too much. It was a little bit unsettling because we weren’t quite sure how Ishan was going to go [after his injury]. Nehal we knew that he could do the job, in the practice games that we played, he actually opened the batting and he played fairly aggressively, which we really needed; someone to go out and play that way tonight.”
“It didn’t come off for us but it’s T20 cricket. You got to adapt to the conditions and today we were thrown a bit of a curveball, unsettled us a bit.”
After winning the toss, MI elected to bowl. Shubman Gill’s 129 off 60 balls propelled Gujarat to 233/3. In response, Mumbai went all-out for 171.