It was a demoralising defeat: Kieron Pollard

Mumbai Indians were handed a crushing 85 runs loss by Sunrisers Hyderabad in their first game at their new home, Visakhapatnam. The SRH bowlers bowled magical spell and completely dominated the MI batting attack.  But Kieron Pollard, the Mumbai Indians all-rounder, insists that it wasn’t the time to play ‘blame-games’ and that they’d remain confident in order to stay in contention for the next round.

Speaking to the media after the massive defeat, Pollard said, “Today was one of the games where you don’t want to actually pinpoint anything, you just want to actually forget it,” he said on Sunday (May 8). “We look at the performances, we just want to forget about it, because this is the back-end of the tournament and you needs guys confident. You don’t needs guys with their heads down, you don’t need people playing blame-games at this point in time, you need all hands on deck in order to get you back in the tournament. So for me personally I think it is one of those things you just have to forget.”

Sunrisers Hyderabad posted a strong total of 177 for 3 after being put into bat first by Mumbai Indians. In reply, Mumbai Indians faltered in their chase, being bowled out for 92 to suffer their second-biggest loss in the IPL in terms of margin of runs. According to Pollard, dealing with huge defeats like this was not new to Mumbai. The burly all-rounder cited the example of their campaign in IPL 2015, when an AB de Villiers special decimated Mumbai, but they came back well and went on to win the title.

“Even if we look back at last year as well, we were on a momentum, we had to win all our games and then we were actually demolished by AB de Villiers at Wankhede. That was a game for us to forget as well, we forgot it and came back strong. There’s a lot of experienced guys in that dressing room, the management team are experienced enough to know how to deal with these sorts of losses. As I said before, what we need now are confident guys and guys with their heads up in order to go forward in the back-end of the tournament,” Pollard said.

Although he chose to keep a positive attitude, Pollard did not shy away from admitting that the loss was demoralising. He also expressed hope of Mumbai staging an immediate comeback in the next game.

“Let’s sum it up and say they had a better game than us. They did well in all three departments and we faltered in all three departments. You don’t want to go into (whether) they bowled better or they have been doing well, So at the end of the day, we lost, it was a demoralising defeat, it was pretty disappointing, all the guys are disappointed in the dressing room and we need to pick ourselves up and come out confident in our next game,” he said.

With five wins and five losses apiece, Mumbai, currently placed fifth, are in a dicey position with four games remaining. Two of those matches will be at Vizag, but before that they will play a game in Bangalore, which according to Pollard, is the prime focus of the team.

“We’ll sit down and we’ll look over the performance, look how the wicket behaved, see where we need to improve. But our next game is on a good batting track in Bangalore. So it’s (remaining games in Vizag) not something you look at at this present time, I think in a couple of days time we have another important game in Bangalore and then when we come back for the last couple of games, then we’ll think about what needs to be done,” he said.

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