Huge sixes, lost balls, catches in crowds, a century from Surya Kumar Yadav, IPL style T20 overs and Rohit Sharma’s failure were the highlights of the day 2 where New Zealand fielders toiled for 90 overs with just 3 scalps on a penultimate day. Mumbai batsmen on day 2 punished the New Zeland bowlers on a batting friendly wicket and scored whopping 402 runs in 540 balls bowled. Ish Sodhi’s two-fer and the lone wicket from Santner were the only things that New Zealand could be proud of. The Khadoos army showed no mercy on the visitors fetching zillions of runs.
The day started with Armaan Jaffer and Kaustubh Pawar rowing the team’s boat safely before Jaffer left the crease on the clock of lunch. Both shared 107 runs for the second wicket with Armaan being the driving force scoring 69 runs. He was succeeded by Rohit Sharma who had a solitary chance to cement his place in the Indian team but a slow and lazy Rohit Sharma was stumped and left stunned by Ish Sodhi failing for one more time in days cricket. it looked like it will mark a downfall of Mumbai innings but Surya Kumar Yadav, who in his last innings at Feroz Shah Kotla batted at a strike rate of 153.33 started from where he left and continued his IPL form.
He showed no mercy on visitors and tore apart the slow bowlers of the opposition team. The T20 specialist was smashing sixes out of the ground at own will. He completed his century with a six but he must be thankful to Ish Sodhi who dropped a sitter off his own bowling when Yadav was on 0.
Pawar on the other end was too difficult to ignore as on one side where Yadav was punching the bowlers, Pawar was holding the innings acting as a backbone of the team. He soon retired after scoring his century giving a chance to the Mumbai captain Aditya Tare to give him a fair chance of batting.
The last 20 overs of the day were played in IPL style with batsmen churning out 102 runs out of the weakened and stressed bowling line up. It was surprising to watch New Zealand bowlers not putting extra efforts as the captain continued with spinners keeping his fast bowlers reserved for the future.
As of now, the Mumbai team has no plans of declaring the innings and looks like they will be playing one more session before they ask their bowlers to come onto the field.