Mumbai Indians’ powerplay has been a major point of discussion, both with bat and ball. Head Coach, Lisa Keightley, in the post-match press conference, spoke of the struggles up top, injury concerns and the task of picking the right team combination with five of the overseas players doing really well. Excerpts..

On the team’s powerplay worries

In the powerplay with the bat, we haven’t clicked. Obviously we’ve tried a few combinations with Hayley (Matthews) being injured at the start of the competition. We didn’t get off to the start we wanted to in the powerplay and then found it hard to go, and have always been behind where we would want to be at that stage. It puts a lot of pressure on our middle order coming in. Losing the toss and batting first, I think Delhi bowled really well up front in the powerplay, attacked the stumps and made it really hard to score. They got two wickets early and put pressure on our middle order to rebuild. I think we didn’t enough runs. 25-30 runs short I’d say.

Reasons for trying out different combinations

We’ve had injuries all the way through. Hayley did her quad coming into the tournament. Then Melie (Amelia Kerr), we know is very valuable in the middle, more so while opening, and she was filling her spot. With Kamalini’s injury, it looked like she had lost confidence in the powerplay, so we moved her down to help her get going. She’s only 17. We’ve had to have batters up in the powerplay that probably, if we were fully fit and we started the competition with Hayley there opening, we wouldn’t have seen as many changes. We are working hard to try and get that combination going. We tried to play Sajana there in the last two games. We desperately want one thing to click and get us a good start.

Injury updates on Kamalini and Sajana  

Kamalini is a shoulder injury. I am not too sure of the depth, but enough to rule her out of the competition. Sajana slide and fell into the advertising board, which is not ideal. She had ice on it. I don’t know the extent of that. We haven’t had much luck on the injury front this season, so we’ll see how it goes.

On not being consistent in the bowling powerplays

I’m not too sure what to put it down to. A lot of the bowlers are world class bowlers. Inside the powerplay, Shabnim (Ismail) has bowled well. This year we’ve had the struggles with five overseas players who have been playing really well and working out those combinations. Unfortunately Nic (Carey) had to go off. She’s got a niggle and we have to see the extent of that. I think she did that through batting today. While bowling, she was carrying the injury from batting. But we didn’t execute today with the ball. Shafali (Verma) and Lizelle (Lee) are both powerful batters and if you miss slightly, batting second with the dew, you go to the boundary. We were unable to bowl and contain consistently and we gave far too many boundaries in the powerplay.

On Amelia Kerr missing out on today’s game

We thought the dew factor will play a big part. Spin in last night’s game wasn’t huge, it was mostly seam. If you bowl stump to stump it becomes really hard to score. Because we had Vaishnavi Sharma come in as the left-armer, who’d played really well for India against Sri Lanka, we thought finger spinners would have it easier in the dew. That was the rationale behind that.