IPL 2016: Spinner Harbhajan Singh clueless about Mumbai Indians opening game woes

Mumbai Indians have a history of struggling to win their first match of the Indian Premier League (IPL). The last time they won their inaugural match of the season was way back in 2012 when they beat Chennai Super Kings. Since then, they have lost all their opening games and the losing streak continued this season too when they were comprehensively beaten by new franchise Rising Pune Supergiants.

Former captain and current player Harbhajan Singh is clueless about Mumbai's habit of losing the opening game. "I wish I knew the reason. We'd like to have the won the first game and started on a good note. It's a game where you can give 110% or 120%. Result is not in our control, we tried our best with whatever total we had," he was quoted as saying by dna.com.

"Hopefully, it should not be like five games Mumbai don't play well and then we suddenly wake up and start playing good. We need to start playing good cricket and hopefully it will happen against Kolkata (Mumbai play Kolkata on 13 April).

"The Mumbai wicket is probably the best to bat on. It was just poor selection that made us where we landed, we just need to work on our game a bit more and sometimes we thing there is hardly time in the middle. But we need to take more time as a batting unit."

Mumbai had a poor opening game against Pune. They managed to score just 121 on a good batting wicket and ended up losing the game by nine wickets. Incidentally, in two of the seasons where they lost their first game — 2013 and 2015 — they went on to win the title.

The Rohit Sharma-lead outfit will look to register their first win of the tournament when they play Kolkata Knight Riders at the Eden Gardens on 13 April (Wednesday).