McClenaghan's agonising day on the field

It was a humid night, but you still had to run in hard. It was a batting track, but you had to hope. Not much was in Mitchell McClenaghan's favour in Mumbai. But he had the chance to make his own luck in the second over, having led Gautam Gambhir to miscue a pull. The ball had gone straight up, McClenaghan looked confident settling under it. But as the ball came down, he suddenly had to reach for it and fluffed the catch. In an effort to make up for the mistake, McClenaghan tried to run Gambhir out in his next over, for which he had to sprint past the batsman, dive into the turf - hard - and flick the ball back onto the stumps. He couldn't and will probably wake up tomorrow with bruises on his chest.

Robin Uthappa was yards down the pitch. He drifted further from safety, thinking he had got the ball away after charging at Harbhajan Singh. Mumbai Indians wicketkeeper Parthiv Patel knew better. The ball was right by his feet and he could probably see the run-out in his mind's eye. Perhaps that's why he took his actual eyes off the ball, and therefore couldn't pick it up and allowed Uthappa to recover.

McClenaghan had probably calmed down after finally getting rid of Gambhir in the 14th over but midway through the 19th, he was just about ready to rip his hair out. A Chris Lynn pull seemed set for deep midwicket, but Tim Southee running to his right spilled the catch. Next ball, Yusuf Pathan got the same routine going and Southee had a simple, waist-high chance homing in on him - and fluffed this too.

Ambati Rayudu was in fine touch and the dew on the Wankhede outfield made it so that he only had to beat the infield to get a boundary. He had struck Jaydev Unadkat for a hat-trick of fours and was looking for more when he charged at Shakib Al Hasan and lifted the ball towards long-on, in the next over. Suryakumar Yadav raced to his right - and he had to because Rayudu had timed it superbly - leaped off the ground because he needed the extra height to get close to the ball and plucked it with both hands close to his chest. Umpire Nitin Menon, much like the spectators, wanted a second look at Suryakumar's ingenuity by the edge of the boundary. Although he was also wondering if the catch was legal. And it certainly was.