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On Wednesday, the media end of Wankhede Stadium’s bottom deck of stands security guards were active. For the evening, ‘ball retrievers’ had been added to each of their job descriptions.
Faf du Plessis was the nets keeper for two periods. One each for Mahipal Lomror, Rajat Patidar, Tom Curran, Glenn Maxwell, Cameron Green, and Suyash Prabhudessai. And dealing with spinning was the main priority. The goal for the batters was to hit the spinners as far as they could because RCB had an abundance of them bowling spin.
At the Wankhede Stadium, spinners have had an economy rate of 7.82 in the IPL since 2021. They have returned 109 wickets at an economy rate of 7.76 in the middle overs (7 to 16).
RCB has struggled against spinners in the middle overs in the 2024 IPL. Although they have only lost four wickets at an average of 50.75, they are the second-lowest scoring team against spin in that phase. Their middle overs strike rate of 125 is only marginally better than KKR’s 122.68. The only two RCB hitters with strike rates above 110 are Patidar (171.42) and Virat Kohli (142.42), both of whom have faced at least ten balls of spin during the middle overs.
All of these indicate a vulnerability that is just waiting to be taken advantage of. Mumbai hasn’t, however, bowled a lot of spin at the Wankhede Stadium this season. In their previous match, Piyush Chawla and Mohammad Nabi shared four overs of bowling while Chawla was the only spinner employed for three overs against the Rajasthan Royals. According to their training regimen, RCB appears to be prepared for a little spin test on game day.
Mumbai has bowled the least amount of spin so far in this IPL – 18 overs, of which Chawla has bowled 10. They have only taken two wickets with spin all year, and their economy rate of 11.22 is the lowest of all the sides.
In case Mumbai do decide to employ more spin, they have left-arm spinner Shams Mulani and Kumar Karthikeya, who can spin it both ways, to turn to. Will Mumbai change their methods to exploit RCB’s potential problems?
Cameron Green makes his way back to the location where he achieved great success in the 2023 IPL with 229 runs at a strike rate of 172.18 and an average of 76.33. He was traded by Mumbai to the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) before of the season. Since then, he has been moved around the batting order without making a significant impact. On Wednesday, he bowled for a little while before starting a 20-minute batting session during which he middled nearly everything. Will he improve at the Wankhede Stadium in the IPL 2024?