Kieron Pollard's 87* helped MI chased down 219 on the last ball of 20th over against CSK.
Chennai Super Kings (CSK) head coach Stephen Fleming says Mumbai Indians (MI) all-rounder Kieron Pollard’s knock took the game away from them in the match 27 of IPL 2021.
Mumbai Indians defeated Chennai Super Kings by 4 wickets in their seventh match of IPL 14 at Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi.
Chasing the mammoth target of 219 runs, MI had a bright start to their innings. However, a mini-collapse in the middle saw them tumbling at 81-3 and it seemed MS Dhoni-led side were set for their sixth consecutive win of the season.
Coming to bat at No.5 Kieron Pollard smashed a brutal 87 not out off only 34 balls, clearing the fence eight times, as MI pulled off a last-ball heist with four wickets in hand.
He along with a decent contribution from Krunal Pandya (32) and Hardik Pandya (16) helped the Rohit Sharma-led side to register their second consecutive win.
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While reflecting on the loss, CSK head coach Stephen Fleming said that his side extremely well to post 219 targets but defending at the small ground is sometimes very difficult to defend.
“You should probably add 10 to the score, especially against the side like Mumbai Indians having power hitters. We did incredibly well to get below 220. We always felt that in-game like this, the batting and the small ground, the surface, it is sometimes very hard to defend,” Stephen Fleming said during the virtual press conference.
Fleming lauded Kieron Pollard for his match-winning innings and said that despite scoring more than 200 runs they were undone by his innings.
“Pollard probably played his best innings in the IPL for a long time. He is an effective player, if you look at the game, he was the mainstay. We did a lot of good things around him, we just couldn’t shut him down. We scored more than 200 and then put pressure on them but we were undone by fine innings in the end,” he said.
Fleming while talking about the field on the last ball said that he was not surprised because with Pollard it’s always difficult to predict what he will do.
“Not really (if he was surprised to see the field on the last ball). Pollard is such a good timer of the ball that you never know what he’s going to do,” he said.
Fleming said that CSK was looking for a lucky run-out or a 2019 IPL final-like finish to win the game.
“Got so much to win, to be honest, we were looking for something like the stumps being hit or like the result, we had when we got beaten in the (2019) final. So we’ll go have a look over that. I think there are a lot of other instances that we’ll have a look at rather than just the last ball,”
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Stephen Fleming further said that he wants CSK to keep making the most of the middle overs in the upcoming games.
“Mumbai was 81/3 but some fine innings get them out of it. So we are happy we kept pushing hard and we are happy to use our resources. We still had Dhoni, Sam Curran, and Shardul Thakur that didn’t bat. So we really wanna push in those middle overs this year,” he concluded.
Despite the loss against Mumbai Indians (MI), CSK are still on the top of the table. The MS Dhoni-led side will next face with Rajasthan Royals (RR) on Wednesday in Delhi.
(ANI inputs)