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After Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) thrashed Lucknow Supergiants (LSG) by 10 wickets on Wednesday, Mumbai Indians (MI) become the first team to get officially knocked out of the playoffs race in IPL 2024. Nothing went right for MI since the captaincy from Rohit Sharma to Hardik Pandya. After leading Gujarat Titans to the title in 2022 and the final in 2023, Pandya decided to go back to his previous franchise for IPL 2024. Not only this, a few days after his return to MI, Pandya was announced as the skipper of the franchise replacing Rohit Sharma, who led the team to five titles from 2013 to 2023.
With the hopes of carrying forward Rohit’s legacy, Hardik failed terribly as a skipper this season as MI have lost eight out of 12 matches so far, and now can’t qualify for the playoffs. According to reports, some of the senior players from MI, with the likes of Rohit, Suryakumar Yadav and Jasprit Bumrah convened a meeting where they expressed their thoughts in the underlying problem in Pandya’s captaincy style this season.
According to NDTV Sports, an official from MI management shredded light on struggles the franchise has been facing due to captaincy transition. “These are regular teething problems for a team that sees leadership change. This happens in sports all the time,” the official was quoted as saying.
Hardik Pandya has been facing a lot of criticism for his captaincy in this year’s IPL and tendency to point out players. After MI’s loss against Delhi Capitals, Pandya questioned Tilak Varma’s game knowledge and said that the MI batter could have Axar Patel more. However, his statement didn’t go well with the MI camp as Tilak scored 63 runs off 32 balls in that game the team’s highest run getter this season with 384 runs from 12 matches.
