Mumbai's mistakes have left them off the pace at the WPL

Mumbai Indians [MI] captain Harmanpreet Kaur stood in her trademark stance, as she often does to catch her breath while batting. Her right foot planted across the left at an angle, her left arm making a teapot at the hip, and her right hand holding the bat into the ground as it bears the weight of her body.

Meanwhile, Nicola Carey was making the long walk back to the dugout in the tenth over of the chase against UP Warriorz (UPW).

Harmanpreet stood in silence and solitude as MI's home ground reverberated with the opposition's celebrations. Seeing the asking rate shoot up over 12 in pursuit of 188, she would have perhaps reflected for a moment on how her team had ended up in this position, not just in the match but in this tournament too.

It might be the halfway mark for WPL 2026, but MI have already played five games out of eight and won just two of them. They now also leave the DY Patil stadium and the familiar shores of Navi Mumbai for Vadodara, which will host the second leg of the season.

Such an unusual start was hardly on anybody's tarot card when MI retained and bought back most of their regular players in the recent auction. Their troubles began early when they were hit by a niggle to opening batter Hayley Matthews, who was returning to action after nearly six months because of a shoulder surgery. With an inexperienced G Kamalini preferred as their other designated opener, MI chose Amelia Kerr to partner with her.

Kerr was fresh off a 59-ball century while opening the batting in the Super Smash only a couple of days before joining the MI camp. But she only swung and missed her way to a 15-ball 4 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru and bagged a golden duck opposite Delhi Capitals before moving back down the order. As Kamalini also struggled with her lack of footwork against swing, MI finished their five games with the lowest powerplay run rate, a forgettable 6.50 compared to the second-lowest figure of 7.56 by UPW.

"Every game we are not coming up with a positive mindset in the powerplay," Harmanpreet said at the presentation. "I think it's something we really need to work on."

This put much of the pressure of scoring on MI's most prolific scorers, Nat Sciver-Brunt, who also missed a game with illness, and Harmanpreet. They did it together for the first victory, against DC, Harmanpreet's 71* off 43 got them two points against Gujarat Giants, Sciver-Brunt did the heavy lifting in their first loss to UPW, and the game where neither of them would score big caught up with them on Saturday, in their third loss.

Even once Matthews was fit for their third game, MI left her out for their next match, where her spin bowling could have been handy on one of the most spin-friendly tracks of this tournament so far. But as their opening woes compounded in her absence, they brought her back on Saturday with a new partner in S Sajana, pushed Kamalini down from the opening slot to No. 8 and left out pace bowler Shabnim Ismail, which gave the continued impression of an unsettled line-up.

MI's lacklustre performances and instability were out in the open even while fielding. When Meg Lanning and Phoebe Litchfield were taking UPW towards a big score after the halfway mark, there came a phase when the match could have tilted easily towards MI had they grabbed even some of their chances.

They failed to capitalise on a mix-up between the two batters in the 12th over, which also saw Kamalini miss a possible stumping chance against Lanning. Next over, Harmanpreet dropped a sitter off Litchfield at cover and lay flat on the ground in disbelief as the home crowd watched in deafening silence. In just five matches, MI have put down ten catches already - two on average per game - easily their worst such ratio in the last four seasons. Even though both the set batters fell soon after, they had hoisted UPW's run rate over 9.50 by plundering 44 runs in a frenzied phase of three overs.

"At this level if you keep missing chances, the other team is going to put a lot of pressure on you and that exactly happened today," Harmanpreet said. "As a team we need to discuss [that] because we have been making a lot of mistakes."

It's possible that the same MI XI could have converted one or two of those chances and shifted the game in their favour, as they often have under pressure over the last three years. But 2026 is serving them a different dish of fate.

"Yeah, it's been a little bit up and down with a couple of losses, and then a couple of wins as well," Kerr said at the press conference. "So yes, that's cricket. We haven't been at our best, so we're not giving ourselves the best chance. Obviously, a few players have been missing out. We've had injuries, we've had illness, so I guess that makes it a little bit difficult at times. We've been thrown things that are outside of our control, but the ability of the group to just get on with things, despite all the noise that's happening around us, is encouraging for the group heading into the back end. Hopefully we can get a consistent group playing together and get our combinations right."

MI have clung onto second place in the WPL points table through all of this but in a season where no-one has looked like pushovers, getting on a roll and gaining lost ground is not going to be easy.