Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) tasted another defeat when they went down by six wickets against Mumbai Indians (MI) on Tuesday night at Wankhede stadium. The defeat has further dented RCB’s chance to qualify for the playoffs as they now have 6 losses from 11 games. With just 3 matches left in the league stage of the competition, pressure increases on RCB. They now must win all matches in the business end of the tournament to ensure they qualify for the playoffs. Rohit Sharma had another poor outing as a batter, scoring just 7 off 8 balls. But his teammates ensured MI closed the game with more than three overs remaining in the contest. Opting to bowl first, MI restricted RCB to 199 for 6 in 20 overs. This seemed like a good bowling effort in view of the high-scoring games the IPL has seen all thanks to the Impact Player effect. Faf du Plessis smashed 65 off 41 balls while Glenn Maxwell played a blinder of 68 off 33 deliveries. Dinesh Karthik (30 off 18) provided the finishing touches to almost take the total to 100.MI started off the chase well. Rohit fell cheaply but the wicket came only after Ishan Kishan had taken them past ffity runs inside 5 overs. From there, Suryakumar Yadav took over and hit 83 off just 35 balls. Nehal Wadhera played an outstanding knock of unbeaten 52 runs off 34 balls and with Cameron Green took MI past the the finish mark

MI rise to number 3 in standings

With the six-wicket win over RCB, MI have now jumped to the third spot in the standings. They are still not very certain to qualify for the plyoffs as the table is beautifully congested. The middle part of the table, especially, has four teams with 10 points. These teams will give it their all to qualify for a place. To put things into perspective, even after 54 matches into the league, no team is out of the reckoning for a berth in the playoffs. Talking about RCB, they have a lot to catch up on as they slip to seventh spot in the table. 

Suryakumar Yadav rises

Suryakumar Yadav had an ordinary start to the season, but the T20 specialist has shown immense improvement and is back in form. His brilliant 83 helped him enter the top 10 of Orange cap list. He now has 376 runs from 11 games an sita at ninth spot in the list after 54 matches in  IPL 2023.

Source : Zee News