Forty-seven for 7, 101 for 7 and 113 for 7 are not scores you would associate with defending champions who have reached the semi-finals of a tournament. If you go back to before this Ranji Trophy season, there was also the 125 for 6 in the Irani Cup and the 111 for 6 and the 106 for 7 from the Ranji knockouts last season, when they went on to lift their 42nd title.
Mumbai are no strangers to crisis; they just always seem to find a way out of it.
So many of Mumbai's great escapes over these two seasons have come courtesy their allrounders, of whom Shardul Thakur has played for India, Tanush Kotian seems close to winning an international cap, and Shams Mulani has played multiple times for India A.
The irony is that the batters who've made low scores in their collapses include the likes of Ajinkya Rahane, Shreyas Iyer, Suryakumar Yadav, Prithvi Shaw, Shivam Dube, and even Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal during their home defeat to Jammu & Kashmir.
It's not like the star players haven't scored at all, because Mumbai's average partnership for the first five wickets this season is 45.26, which is the second-best among all teams. But a lot of those top-order runs have come against the attacks of Meghalaya, Services, Odisha, Tripura and Maharashtra. Mumbai have needed their lower order to salvage them when they got in trouble against Baroda on a turner, against J&K in swinging and seaming conditions, and most recently while facing Haryana in the quarter-finals.
No wonder Mumbai have already had ten 50-plus scores (including two centuries) from their Nos. 7-11, the most, by a distance, by any team this season. Even more remarkably, they had 15 such scores from their Nos. 7-11 (the most in a Ranji Trophy season since 2005-06) last season, and went on to lift the title.
Over the last two seasons, Mumbai have had the most (nine) century stands of any Ranji Trophy team for the sixth wicket or lower. And it isn't a new phenomenon. Since the 2005-06 season, they have 52 century stands for the sixth wicket or lower, six more than Karnataka in second place. Just when oppositions think they are on top after removing Mumbai's star batters, their lower order often finds a way to make the most of the remaining fuel in the tank.
In a way, Mumbai have been lucky this season that Thakur has not found a place in India's squads since his comeback from foot surgery last summer, and his two hundreds in these last two seasons have played a crucial role in their success. He turned an abject situation into an innings win with his 109 in the semi-final against Tamil Nadu last season, and he kept Mumbai fighting tooth and nail against J&K, albeit in a losing cause, with 51 and 119 against J&K in January. When he top-scored with 75 in the first innings of the 2023-24 Ranji final against Vidarbha, he said he loved "to play in tough situations and tough conditions", and threw his weight behind the likes of Rahane and Iyer, who he felt were simply going through a "rough patch."
Having averaged 31.87 with the bat last season, Thakur has gone even better this time, scoring 402 runs at 40.20, with a century and three fifties.
The nature of Thakur's batting also helps teams recover quickly from pressure situations. Against J&K this year and Tamil Nadu last season, he came out all guns blazing and smashed 119 off 135 (18 fours) and 109 off 105 (13 fours and four sixes).
Kotian and Mulani, the other architects of Mumbai's rescue acts, play slightly different roles with the bat. Kotian brings great confidence to the crease, plays free-flowing strokes all around the ground, and has earned Rahane's approval for being "always willing to put his hand up". He kickstarted the 2023-24 season with three straight fifties, and scored his maiden first-class hundred while putting on a record 232 with Tushar Deshpande for the last wicket in the quarter-final against Baroda. When he followed it up with an unbeaten 89 in the semi-final, and scored 64 and 114* in the Irani Cup a few months later, against an attack that included Mukesh Kumar, Prasidh Krishna and Yash Dayal, Kotian showed he was making rapid strides towards becoming a genuine allrounder.
Mulani, Rahane says, is always "looking to improve his skills and mindset," and the work he's done with the bat is showing in his results. He averaged 29.41 last season, with four fifties, while striking at a fairly sedate 44.68. This season, he's not only upped his average, to 35.00, but also his strike rate, to 63.50. While he hit a boundary roughly every 20 balls last season, he's been hitting one every 12.4 balls this time around.
In the semi-final starting Monday, Mumbai will take on Vidarbha, a side that has charted a similar path to reach the knockouts. Vidarbha have lost five wickets for under 100 runs more often (five times) than Mumbai (four) this season, and have eight 50-plus scores from their lower order (8-11) compared to Mumbai's ten. And they've won four games over the last two seasons after being five down for under 100, compared to Mumbai's two.
Mumbai's lower order, then, may just meet its match in Nagpur. If Mumbai want to get into their second straight final, they might want their frontline batters to do their bit too.
Stats inputs by Namooh Shah