A tough outing. A tough result. But not without positives. From coming back hard with the bat to having had the opposition down in the second innings despite all the dew is something Mumbai Indians can take a lot of confidence out of. Our Head Coach, Lisa Keightley was at the post-match presser, looking back. Excerpts..

Thoughts on the match

It was definitely underpar. It looked quite hard early and Lauren Bell bowled extremely well in those conditions. But to get to the score we probably did was good, but if we’d have got another 10 runs off the final over, it could have been different. But it was well under par, we know that, on this pitch. To fight and stretch the game out and to have the position to win the match in the last over, there’s a lot of good things. But the dropped catches hurt us in the long run.

Preparing for dew in the second innings

We’ve trained every night in the evenings and ensured we bowled late to practice with the wet ball. We only had a small amount of runs on the board, so to bowl with the dew in these conditions, I thought we did extremely well. Nadine (de Klerk) batted perfectly to finish the match off. She had perfect ball striking. Unfortunately, Nat (Sciver-Brunt) couldn’t execute the over she wanted to and that’s pretty much how it’s gone. First game, we were competitive. There were parts of the game where we could have won the match. We have to bounce back tomorrow. We know the conditions, we know what we are going to get. Tighten up in a few areas and go again to try and get the two points tomorrow.

On young Kamalini opening the batting

She is extremely talented. I saw her in her state matches where she dominated. I thought she did extremely well for her first hit out. It’s exciting to see what she’s going to do in this competition if that is the level she’s going to start at. I see her having a great tournament, going from strength to strength and building on what she did out there today. Very exciting time. Glad that she is in our team. She is a fantastic player for MI. I think she’ll do really well in this competition.

On what makes Kamalini special

Truly exciting. To me, her game is really sound. She plays spin and seam really well. We saw her dominate spin, she’s going to face world class bowlers in this competition. She’s going to get better and better potentially with teams bowling quick at her. She has handled that really well in the nets with Nat and Shabnim, Milly Illingworth. She is training with quick bowlers to prepare for when she comes out to face the new ball. She is a great kid. She is really good around the group. She has got that carefree attitude around the group as a 17-year-old. She comes down with a big smile at breakfast. She’s lovely to work with.

Update on Hayley Matthews’ injury

Unfortunately, he shoulder isn’t really great. At training, she got a strain. She got really close. She was too close to play tonight. But we’ll see how she goes for tomorrow. But she’s pretty close.