Turning Point: These 18 balls became the turning point of the match for Mumbai Indians, the victory slipped from Gujarat’s hands.

New Delhi: Five-time champions Mumbai Indians are once again back on the winning track in the Indian Premier League 2026. Mumbai defeated Gujarat Titans by a huge margin of 99 runs in their sixth match of the season. Earlier, Mumbai had lost in four consecutive matches. In such a situation, this victory is no less than a lifesaver for him. Not only this, with this victory the Mumbai team has now moved from 10th to 7th position in the points table.

However, this victory was not that easy for Mumbai. Captain Hardik Pandya was invited to bat first after losing the toss at Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad. Mumbai had a very bad start in batting. The team had lost its 3 wickets within 50 runs. The batting had also become very slow. Till 17 overs of the innings, Mumbai’s score was only 141 runs. It seemed that Mumbai would be able to score only 160 to 170 in front of Gujarat’s tight bowling, but what happened in the last 3 overs changed the whole situation.

Mumbai scored 58 runs in 18 balls

Given the slow batting against Gujarat, no one thought that Mumbai would be able to reach the score of 199 runs, but in the last 18 balls, Tilak Verma (not out 101 runs in 45 balls) batted brilliantly for his team and added 58 runs. This proved to be the biggest turning point of the match for Mumbai, because a psychological pressure of 200 runs was created on Gujarat’s batsmen. The result was that Gujarat’s top order batting completely disintegrated in its attempt to score runs quickly.

Mumbai Indians bowlers also benefited from this. Especially Ashwani Kumar wreaked havoc. Ashwini took 4 wickets for 24 runs in 4 overs for Mumbai. Apart from this, Mitchell Santner and Allah Ghazanfar also took 2-2 wickets while Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya took 1-1 wicket with the new ball to defeat Gujarat in the beginning. In this way, the team led by Shubman Gill accepted defeat after scoring 100 runs in 15.5 overs.