Punjab Kings registered a hammering seven-wicket win against Mumbai Indians at the Wankhede Stadium. With the ball, Arshdeep Singh claimed a three-wicket haul, while Prabhsimran Singh and Shreyas Iyer stole the show with the bat, registering a half-century each. With that, Mumbai suffered their fourth consecutive defeat in the competition, having picked up just one win so far in IPL 2026.
After the game, captain Hardik Pandya was visibly frustrated as he indicated taking some harsh calls ahead of the next clash against Gujarat Titans on April 20. Reflecting on the series of defeats, Pandya noted that he is unsure if thereโs a fault with the team, individuals or they lack preparation in planning. Adding to that, the all-rounder asked the players to take ownership and noted that the team might be forced to take the difficult calls of dropping players if they donโt improve.ย
โTo be very honest, I don’t have much to say right now. I think we really need to go back on the drawing board and see where are we lacking. Is it individuals? Is it as a group? Is it as planning? We’ll just figure it out and see what we can do next,โ Hardik said in the post-match presentation.
โI think we need to see, do we need to make some difficult calls or do we need to keep continuing and hope that we’ll turn things around. These are some harsh questions which eventually we need to answer and yeah, ownership has to be taken,โ he added.ย
Analysing Hardikโs presentation
Hardik has indirectly fired shots at players like Suryakumar Yadav and Tilak Varma, who have struggled big time in the ongoing season. The India T20I captain has registered only 106 runs in five matches, while Tilak added only 43 runs in the same number of matches. Absolutely nothing worked in their favour at the moment and Hardik may have indicated the same during his post-match talks.
He has hinted at changes to the playing XI and it will be interesting if Mumbai make these two changes, especially given that Suryakumar and Tilak were part of Indiaโs World Cup-winning campaign. On top of that, Suryakumar was the captain of the team.ย
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