Mumbai Indians and Royal Challengers Bangalore have locked horns a dozen times and shared the spoils in the Indian Premier League so far.
RCB tripped in the final against Deccan Chargers by six runs in the second IPL final in South Africa and MI achieved its best by reaching the semifinal in the third year.
Both have undergone a lot of changes in the last few years and it appears that the Bangalore team ably led by Virat Kohli has the wherewithal to put up a good fight for the title.
On Saturday, table-topper RCB takes on Mumbai Indians in the Pepsi-IPL-VI here.
Chris Gayle has been in intimidating form in home territory making 414 of his 432 runs (254 balls, 34x6 and 32x4) in eight matches and Kohli too has impressed with 333 runs.
Seamers R. Vinay Kumar and R.P. Singh have taken 13 and 10 wickets respectively at a fraction lower than 18 and in current form they must be looking forward to sustain RCB’s 3-1 record at Mumbai Indians’ home venues.
MI struggles
While the Royal Challengers have fared well and along with CSK have 12 points from six matches, the Mumbai Indians have been struggling to put things in order; so much so that its captain Ricky Ponting found it hard to put bat to ball and offered the captaincy to Rohit Sharma in the match against Kolkata Knight Riders at Kolkata.
Defeated by the Royal Challengers by two runs in the first-leg encounter at the Chinnaswamy Stadium on April 4, Mumbai Indians registered wins in the away match against CSK and the homes matches against Delhi Daredevils and Pune Warriors.
But MI did not find the next 10 days very rewarding, losing to Rajasthan Royals at Jaipur and the Daredevils at the Kotla.
Dwayne Smith and Rohit Sharma engineered Mumbai to a morale-boosting win over Kolkata in the last away match to be positioned in the mid-table cluster.
The outcome of the home matches against Royal Challengers Bangalore on Saturday and Kings XI Punjab on Monday would be crucial for MI to make the play-offs.
