Biography
Mumbai, the land of myriad dreams is a melting pot and the Mumbai Indians unit does its best to showcase the same. One of the costliest teams in the IPL, they are owned by Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries Limited. Sachin Tendulkar has to be the most iconic figure to play for them. In the initial years, the team possessed solid hitters like Aiden Blizzard, Ambati Rayudu and Rohit Sharma combined with a host of exciting all-rounders like Kieron Pollard, James Franklin, etc and arguably the world's best T20 bowler in Lasith Malinga.
Mumbai's best show came in the third season, wherein they ended up as finalists, losing to the eventual winners, Chennai Super Kings. They were also a part of the Champions League T20 that year, but could not sustain for long. In 2011 too, Mumbai Indians qualified to play in the CLT20 as a result of finishing third in the Indian Premier League. Despite the absence of senior players like Tendulkar, Mumbai went into the competition as underdogs with Harbhajan Singh leading from the front and emerged as winners of the 2011 Champions League T20, beating the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the finals.
Mumbai Indians gained a lot out of the 2012 auctions, as they bought some valuable foreign players in the form of Herschelle Gibbs, Mitchell Johnson, Richard Levi, Thisara Perera, etc. Andrew Symonds announced his retirement from all forms of cricket and was hence missing. While Johnson was ruled out even before playing a single game, others contributed fairly. However, that wasn't enough as a struggling Mumbai side was thrown out by the Chennai Super Kings in the Eliminator, thus ending their average campaign.
A year later though, the wait for their first trophy ended as they beat Chennai in the finals. Mumbai then went on to win two more in the next 4 years and under Rohit Sharma became a very strong unit. However, 2018 was not a year to remember as they failed to qualify for the knockout stage, they emerged stronger in the following year to win their fourth title, a feat never achieved before.
After gaining a reputation of winning the title only in the odd years, Mumbai successfully managed to buck the trend in 2020. They topped the table and secured their 5th title by beating Delhi in the final. The following season though turned out to be an inconsistent one for them where they finished fifth and failed to reach the playoffs.
In 2022 two new teams were introduced. Ahead of the 2022 mega auction, the team retained 4 players who were Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Kieron Pollard and Surya Kumar Yadav. They left Hardik Pandya who was one of their core players for a long time. In the mega auction, they purchased back Ishan Kishan for a hefty sum of ?15.25. They began the season on a poor note losing their first 8 matches which is the worst in the history of the tournament. They ended the tournament with 4 wins out of 14 matches making the 15th season their worst by finishing at the bottom of the points table.
The 2023 season was a topsy-turvy one for Mumbai. With a virtually absent spearhead bowler in their lineup thanks to an injury to headline bowler Jasprit Bumrah, the pace attack was led by English spearhead Jofra Archer and consisted of several domestic bowlers including purchases from the 2023 auction. Despite starting off slow to start the tournament losing 2 of the 3 opening encounters, the tournament saw Mumbai rally back with solid performances from emerging bowler Akash Madhval and team youngster Tilak Varma. Mumbai qualified for the playoffs in 4th spot to end the season with 8 wins and 6 losses. After eliminating Lucknow during the Eliminator, the Mumbai team went on to lose to Gujarat in Qualifier 2 to end their season.
For the 2024 season, the management made a shocking decision to trade Hardik Pandya from Gujarat and created room for him by trading Cameroon Green to Bengaluru. This was followed by naming Hardik Pandya the captain for Mumbai replacing Rohit Sharma. This created some controversies and the fans weren’t happy with it.
