It’s a trial by error for Giants as promising season ends in Eliminator

“I’m certainly not a medical expert, but I’ve had some [tendon injuries] before when I used to play and it does get better as you warm-up, so we tried to give her another opportunity just to come out and see if she could [play], and she would have potentially liked to play as a batter only,” Giants coach Michael Klinger said after the game. “But we would have been a bowler short, so it was an obvious choice to bring Danny Gibson in for her as a direct replacement and I thought Danny did a great job tonight.

“Deandra is a fantastic player and an impact player, so there’s no doubt when she doesn’t play last minute you lose a little bit.”

“We may have actually misread it [the conditions] slightly,” Klinger said about opting to bowl. “We actually felt the wicket had a little bit of tackiness in it when we saw it before the toss, and we thought it may have done a little bit with the new ball in the first innings or even just held and spun a little. But that wasn’t the case, it played pretty well.

“But tosses in T20 cricket don’t win you games. In fact, it was soaking wet out there in the second half tonight, so probably would have been a lot easier bowling first than second. But when you’re defending a 200-plus score, then it puts a batting group under pressure, and that’s probably how we lost a lot of our wickets tonight.”

Mumbai’s fielding was on point, starting with Matthews’ dive in the first over of the chase to remove Beth Mooney before her team-mates accepted the challenge of completing every run-out chance that came their way, and they got it right three times.

“Yeah, our fielding wasn’t great tonight,” Klinger said. “That was obvious for most to see. And I thought Mumbai Indians’ fielding was fantastic. They would have said the other night when they lost to RCB that they wouldn’t have been happy with their fielding either, so it does happen some nights. We would have liked to have put in a better performance in the field because, as I said, I think there was about a 40-run swing there. I thought probably minus 20 to us and plus 20 to them. And, you know, we lost by 47 runs. So sometimes that can be the big difference in in the game, but that’s okay, that happens.”

After Mooney fell early, Harleen Deol was involved in a mix up and fell short. Not long after, Gibson was run out while trying to steal a second, and Kashvee Gautam paid the price of taking on Harmanpreet Kaur’s arm inside the 30-yard circle.

“Yeah, a few run-outs in a run chase isn’t ideal as well, but you know that was going to be a tough ask, and we had to get a lot of things right in that chase and didn’t quite happen,” Klinger said.

The right call at the toss, a fully-fit star allrounder in the XI, catches taken and runs completed, and who knows what the result might have been.