On Tuesday (17th April), reigning champion Mumbai Indians (MI) registered their first win in four matches when it beat the Virat Kohli-led Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) convincingly as RCB lost the match by 46 runs in the on-going IPL 2018 cricket carnival.

RCB won the toss and asked MI to bat first and it appeared that Mumbai would stutter a lot when it lost two wickets in the first two deliveries as Indian pacer Umesh Yadav clean-bowled opener Suryakumar Yadav and one-drop wicketkeeper-batsman Ishan Kishan (who later had to abandon his wicket-keeping assignment after he suffered an injury near his right eye by getting hit by the ball off an awkward bounce).

However, MI steadied their innings with useful contributions from opener Evin Lewis and a match-winning 94 off 52 balls (with ten 4’s and five 6’s) by captain Rohit Sharma.  Pandya brothers too made useful contributions.  RCB’s chase wasn’t even as they kept losing wickets at regular intervals.  Kohli, who opened the batting with South African Quinton de Kock, remained unbeaten on 92 at the end of 20 overs.  He hit seven 4’s and four 6’s but the ‘Master of Chase’ couldn’t take his team to victory as he waged a lone battle and found literally no support from other batsmen.

This is the 11th year of IPL and during all the matches in the past ten years, no other match has ever witnessed the instance of both the captains scoring more than 90 runs; thus Kohli and Rohit Sharma, batting mainstays of India’s ODI and T20 teams, have thus created a unique record!

Both MI and RCB how have just 2 points from four matches as they have won only one game each out of their four assignments so far.  They occupy the sixth and seventh positions (respectively) on the points tally which is headed by Kolkata Knight Riders which has won 3 out of their five matches.  Sunrisers Hyderabad, which has an all-win record in its three matches, is at No.2 on the table with a lesser run-rate.