What has happened to the Mumbai Indians?

From a very un-Mumbai auction to a very un-Mumbai performance, just what caused the 180* for Mumbai?

Mumbai Indians are obviously having an appalling season – they have lost 7 in a row and are functionally out (they would realistically have to win every game they have left to put themselves in contention). Some of their failures have been down to poor individual performance. For example, Rohit Sharma and Ishan Kishan have really struggled at the top of the order whilst Bumrah has not been quite himself and Tymal Mills has been expensive.

Mumbai have also employed some odd on-field tactics such as holding Suryakumar Yadav, their best batter, back too late in the innings and exposing the likes of Basil Thampi and Jaydev Unadkat at the death. However, what I want to touch on here are some of the more ‘macro’ mistakes Mumbai have made this season and how they could have long-term repercussions going forward. Specifically, I want to talk about Mumbai’s problem with recency bias, their lack of identity, and their apparent buying into rapidly emerging narratives. These are all common mistakes teams make so Mumbai represents a pretty interesting case study.

Let us start with recency bias. Here is MI’s team from their first game of IPL 2022: Rohit, Kishan, Anmolpreet Singh, Tilak Verma, Kieron Pollard, Tim David, Daniel Sams, Murugan Ashwin, Mills, Bumrah, and Thampi. Whilst not perfect, this is a side with good players in specialized positions and with a decent balance, especially if you consider SKY would have played for Anmolpreet if available.

However, after just two low scores, Tim David was dropped and after just one bad bowling day for Mills against KKR, he was also dropped. Mills, whatever way you want to spin it, has been a top ten death bowler in the world for the last couple of years whilst David strikes at 196 at the death since the start of 2020. However, based on an incredibly small sample size both players were dropped. Mumbai presumably decided that 2 or 3 games were an appropriate sample size to determine that these players were either a). horribly out of form or b). not good enough for the standard of the tournament.

Neither of these can be accurately asserted in a sample this small. This is especially true given that Mills was actually decent in 2 out of his first 3 games and that finishing in T20s is a role where you fail more than you succeed—Andre Russell is the best death hitter in the history of cricket but averaged just 13 for the whole 20/21 IPL.

Franchise seasons are short in as far as they don’t actually possess many games compared to, say, top-level football. As such, teams often panic after a few bad performances in a way they probably would not in a 30 or 40-game season. However, a shorter season does not reduce the bounds of what is statistically significant—the fact that you can have your best players out of form for a lot of a 14-game season is just an uncontrollable variable and something you have to learn to live with. However, Mumbai seems to have let the significance of a few bad results make them slam the panic button, leading to them dropping players after a very small sample of results.

This is where recency bias intersects with adherence to popular narratives. Mumbai, we are always told, is one of the ‘legacy’ franchises—they have won a lot in the past and hence have to be good this season, even though all the teams are largely new (even the way the IPL seeded the groups by past IPL wins perpetuates the idea of ‘big’ and ‘small’ clubs in a salary-controlled league).

When Mumbai lost 3 games, there was a sense on social media that this really was a panic station – Mumbai is a ‘big’ club with legacy players and therefore ‘shouldn’t’ be winless, there must be something fundamentally wrong. You can’t drop the core players, they are club legends, so the big money overseas gets the boot because Mumbai decided to pay loads of money for them so they should have had their bad days in a less well-paid league. Dropping Mills in particular, I believe, demonstrates the importance of timing; if that same Mills bad day came after Mumbai had won a few games it feels highly unlikely that he would have been dropped.

It is worth noting that this example is not an argument against constructing narratives around cricket—historian Hayden White argues persuasively that to understand past events, one must fit them into stories one can tell themselves. What Mumbai seem to have fallen foul of is embracing uncritically a narrative that was hastily constructed around little evidence rather than building their own carefully and calmly. This narratively driven panic was enabled by their clear recency bias.

Closely related to these ideas of recency bias and narrative are issues around identity and philosophy.

A lot of great teams over time have a very clear identity—one can think of the mighty Perth Scorchers of the past in the Big Bash or the great boundary-hitting West Indies side that we are just seeing fade away now. These teams held in dialogue their player pool and a set of ideas about how the game should be played, eventually arriving at a style of play that is clear and that suits them as a team.

Philosophies are important both in terms of trying to pursue a strategy that maximizes one’s resources and in allowing players to have a lens through which to interpret a functionally infinite number of different scenarios on the field (they are essentially what Bourdieu would cause a ‘habitus’ in as far as they provide a framework for responding to new scenarios).

In the current IPL, there are a few teams with a clear identity—the Punjab Kings try and win the boundary count whilst the Sunrisers Hyderabad rely heavily on seam bowling and sturdy batting. You can agree or disagree on whether these are good tactics but they kind of know how they are trying to play.

The extremely strong Mumbai team of the last mega-auction cycle had some sense of identity; strong role players in their batting line-up and a lean towards seam. However, their incredible recruitment of domestic talent like Bumrah, Rohit, Kishan, and the Pandyas meant that they possibly did not have to think too hard about playing style as their squad was just simply clear of the competition. This may well be coming back to bite them this season where the player pool is weaker and they just seem totally identity-less.

Mumbai started the season with a domestic top 4, overseas hitters at 5 and 6, a seaming allrounder at 7, and a seam heavy bowling attack. Since then we have seen them swap their number 6 David for a number 3 in Brevis, move from an allrounder at 7 to a bowler in an attempt to become a bowling side, and then move back to an allrounder at 7, this time a spinner. All the while, they have not shown any great ethos—what part of the innings do they attack with the bat? Are they trying to manufacture low or high-scoring games? What is their USP as a side?

Falling into the recency bias trap and playing without identity is not just dangerous for Mumbai’s current season—they could possibly present challenges going forward. Every team that has ever played cricket will be poor for a season. It is completely inevitable.

If you are set up like this year’s Punjab with a set philosophy and a fairly consistent team balance and XI, you would arrive at the end of a theoretically bad season with a lot of data about your approach and players. From this position of introspective knowledge, you are well placed to draw up a plan of action to improve for the next season. What Mumbai have done is change so much and create such uncertainty and messiness that it is very difficult to see what they have really learned from all their failure.

To summarize, Mumbai have matched some poor performances on the pitch with what appears to be some quite fundamental mistakes off of it. Their panicking and poor planning seems strangely uncharacteristic for what is normally a well-run team.