Mumbai Indians defeated the Kolkata Knight Riders by 13 runs as they still stay alive in the race of playoffs in this year’s IPL. Hardik Pandya won the ‘Man of the Match’ for his all-round performance.

KKR won the toss and opted to field first where they made two changes in their playing XI as Nitish Rana came back in place of Rinku Singh and Prasidh Krishna was given an opportunity in place of Shivam Mavi. Mumbai Indians played with the same team as the previous match.

Mumbai Indians started exceptionally well with their opening batsmen, Suryakumar Yadav(59) and Evin Lewis(43). They were engaged in a partnership of 91 runs at the end of nine overs. After that Rohit Sharma also soon departed for 11. An innings of 35 runs off 12 balls from the bat of Hardik Pandya helped MI post 181/4 on the board.

KKR opened their batting with Chris Lynn and Shubman Gill where they failed to score big runs. After them, Robin Uthappa played a wonderful knock of 54 runs at number 3 who got good support from Rana (31) who was making his comeback. Dinesh Karthik too played a knock of 36* at the end of the innings but the required run rate had reached way too much as KKR fall short of the target.

Hardik Pandya impressed with the ball as well with his match figures of 4-0-19-2. Except Ben Cutting, rest all other bowlers picked at least a wicket for Mumbai.

With this win, Mumbai Indians climb up to the fifth position in the Points Table with four wins. Mumbai will be very happy with this game as even after a failure from the bat of Rohit Sharma, they won it. Also, MI would be relieved from the form of Hardik Pandya after this match which was a major concern for his team.