A well-worked win over RCB at the Wankhede tonight and we rose from eighth to third spot in the IPL 2023 points table. The win also puts us in charge of our fate in the race for the playoffs.

With three matches left in the league stage, and two of those at home, well, eh, we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves here.

“Yeah, it's amazing. The competition's so tight (this year). This was a very important win for us, that's for sure. So hopefully we just need to keep this momentum rolling. We've got three big games coming up,” Jason Behrendorff - the star with the ball who set the tone with two early wickets - said in the post-match press conference after the crucial win.

Chasing 200 to win, it was SKY’s sensational knock that got us past the finish-line tonight. However, Jason deserves as much credit for keeping the RCB total under control. The Aussie quick first rocked the RCB top order, picking up Virat Kohli and Anuj Rawat early and then returned for a second spell to break a century-partnership between Glenn Maxwell and Faf du Plessis, which threatened to take the game away from us at one stage.

“I think the partnership was about 100 or 50 balls at one stage. So, we really needed to, to break that partnership. We had a few different plans, a few things nearly worked and then yeah, we were able to sort of crack through it at the back end, which gave us a really good opportunity to dry them up towards the end of the innings,” he noted.

“If we can take wickets at regular intervals and it stems the flow of the batters and gain, like we were able to take consistent wickets throughout the innings, which helped after that big partnership.”

MI had chased down two 200+ scores before tonight in the IPL this season. Add another 200 to the list!

“It's credit to our batting group. We've got a really long batting line-up. We’ve got SKY, who is at a different, different level. He's been batting amazingly. We’ve seen what Timmy David can do at the back end. And then Nehal (Wadhera), who has come in in the last few games in particular and has really taken the game on. So, we've got some great options, which is really important.”

Asked about Chris Jordan replacing the injured Jofra Archer in our squad, Jason said, “Yeah, it's unfortunate for Joff. Having had plenty of injuries myself, I can say it's never fun. So yeah, Joff was great while he was able to play for us. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out for him this season but we've got a class replacement in Chris Jordan. CJ has played a lot of cricket around the world. He's very experienced and yeah, he's especially good for bowling at the back end and he's really important to have in our team now.”