Mumbai Indians sealed their fifth IPL title in eight years on Tuesday as they beat Delhi Capitals in the Dubai International Stadium by five wickets. Chasing 157, captain Rohit Sharma led from the front as he scored a brilliant 68 run off 51 balls to guide his team home.
“I mean firstly we are very happy to be on the ground, everyone did a good job to get the tournament going, the safety of players was taken care of. I would like to congratulate all the franchises as well regarding no hiccups in terms of the bio-bubble created, all franchises were very disciplined in order to make IPL this year a huge success. I hope this championship we have won is something that brings joy to people back home,” Sharma noted.
When asked about what his plan was coming in to chase in the post-match press conference, he said, “There was no strategy as such, I just wanted to be positive in my thought process, Ashwin is their key bowler and I just wanted to put pressure on their key bowler, he is a quality bowler, it came off, when you are chasing a target like that, you want to get off to a good start, you want to make sure there is no pressure at the back end, we just wanted to capitalise on the first three-four overs.”
Source: Twitter (IPL)
Earlier, Delhi Capitals had been reduced to 22/3 inside four overs, credit to some fantastic new ball exploits from Trent Boult. It was then that Captain Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant knitted a 96-run partnership. But even then they could only take DC to a respectable total.
“We knew Stoinis and Dhawan are Delhi’s key batters, so we wanted to bowl our key bowlers at them, getting early wickets was the key, we wanted to take early wickets, when you have the best new bowler in your squad, why not go with that? Boult has been fantastic for us this season and so has Bumrah. They are the ones who kept us in the game most of the game throughout. Pattinson, Coulter-Nile, Chahar, and Krunal Pandya also did their job,” said Sharma.
For Mumbai Indians, Ishan Kishan and Suryakumar Yadav scored 516 and 480 runs in IPL 2020. Talking about the performance of these two batters, captain looked delighted and said, “Look, Surya and Kishan have been superb with the bat, we saw the results on the ground, they played with a lot of freedom, they are very talented in shot-making, it was important for us to give them freedom, the owners also gave them real confidence to go out there and express themselves.”