The IPL season 8 is nearing the half way mark already and most of the teams are rallying against each other to make the cut to the top four positions on the leader board. The two teams facing off in today’s encounter are Mumbai Indians and Delhi Daredevils; both teams haven’t really played to their strengths and also won only one (MI) and two (DD) matches respectively of their earlier 5 outings.
AnimationXpress.com calls today’s clash as the fight for supremacy between The Ant Man of MI and the intelligent Groot from Delhi Daredevils.
Although Groot was only seen on-screen in the tent-pole, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), as a mono-syllabic sentient-tree like creature, the fictional superhero is seemingly intelligent and his re-generation abilities often resurrect him from the dead. Much like Groot, the Indian Bowler Amit Mishra displays subtle intelligence in reading the batsmen spinning his leg-breaks right to the stumps. He has been picking up wickets at his whim and continues to lead the spin attack for the Devils.
On the other hand, while Paul Rudd may be playing Ant Man in its upcoming feature, on the cricket field, it’s the Lankan pace bowler who takes the mantle of being one of the most economic bowlers in world cricket. Now we all know that Ant Man can shrink to the tiniest of sizes or enlarge himself to even play God to us humans. Malinga’s fiery bowling is no different. From the economic Yorkers ditching the batsmen’s eye to bang on bouncers, Malinga can give it all.
Keep watching this space to see which other lucky cricketers get to feature as an animated version of themselves in the coming days…
Delhi Daredevils: JP Duminy (c), Yuvraj Singh, Manoj Tiwary, Quinton De Kock, Imran Tahir, Nathan Coulter-Nile, Angelo Mathews, Gurinder Sandhu, Travis Head, Albie Morkel, Markus Stoinis, Kedar Jadhav, Mayank Agarwal, Mohammed Shami, Amit Mishra, Jaidev Unadkat, Zaheer Khan, Shahbaz Nadeem, Saurabh Tiwary, Jayant Yadav, Shreyas Iyer, CM Gautam, Srikar Bharat, KK Jiyas, Domnic Joseph.
Mumbai Indians: Rohit Sharma (c), Aaron Finch, Ambati Rayudu, Abhimanyu Mithun, Aditya Tare, Parthiv Patel, Keiron Pollard, Corey Anderson, Lasith Malinga, Harbhajan Singh, Jasprit Bumrah, Josh Hazlewood, Marchant de Lange, Pawan Suyal, Shreyas Gopal, Lendl Simmons, Pragyan Ojha, Mitchell McClenaghan, Aiden Blizzard, Akshay Wakhare, Nitish Rana, Sidhesh Lad, Hardik Pandya, Jagadeesha Suchitch, Unmukt Chand and Vinay Kumar.