Brian Lara believes that Kieron Pollard could have given Jasprit Bumrah the ball in the middle overs, in place of one of the two spinners to keep the pressure on CSK.
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Legendary West Indies cricketer Brian Lara believes that a few tactical mistakes by Mumbai Indians (MI) stand-in skipper Kieron Pollard, cost the defending champions their IPL 2021 encounter against Chennai Super Kings (CSK). Lara expressed his belief that handing Jasprit Bumrah the ball in the middle overs rather than opting to go with two spinners, would have helped maintain the pressure on the CSK batsmen.
“They (CSK) should have been done and dusted by the Mumbai Indians. There are a few things that Kieron Pollard did out there that I felt he didn’t really press gas at the right time and sort of just came off the pedal and allowed the Chennai Super Kings to get back into the match. But I felt that you make it easy, you can’t have Bumrah just bowling one over at that stage,” said Lara said while speaking to cricket.com.
“I can’t blame the Mumbai bowlers, but I just felt that they could have done a little bit better tactically. I think it’s more tactical. You’ve got two spinners that you most likely will have to use at some point in time. I wouldn’t necessarily say the bowlers were bad. I felt if they had used them properly, no way 156 was on the card for Chennai Super Kings,” he added.
Pollard termed a sloppy performance with the ball during the death overs, as a factor that helped CSK make a comeback and eventually win the game.
“We must have got a partnership. You can do a lot of things differently in hindsight. Losing by 20 runs, I think that is the difference. Gave too many with the ball at the end. Their batters tried to continue the momentum throughout, we didn’t do that. We could have learnt from their mistake of losing too many wickets in the powerplay. We needed one guy to bat deep. Had a couple of soft dismissals. We can’t let that happen at this level, but we still have six games to go,” said the all-rounder as quoted by Cricbuzz.
CSK skipper MS Dhoni was full of praise for Ruturaj Gaikwad who made his presence felt with a fine performance when it mattered the most.
“I think at 30/4, you want to get something respectable on the board and Ruturaj and Bravo got us more than what we expected. We had to bat exceptionally to get to 140, but to get to 160 was tremendous. The wicket was slightly two-paced and slow to start off with. Most of them got out to the slowness. If you come later and you want to go hard and that’s why we lost wickets. I would have tried to get into the eighth or ninth over and then take it from there. You always think you could have gone harder earlier, but with wickets down, it was a risk,” said Dhoni.
“There’s always a catch, one batter played till the end and the others contributed well. It’s a give and take, you need to see how many fast bowlers have in the armoury and how much time they take to bowl their overs. If a fast bowler has a long run-up or wastes a lot of time, it is tough for the captains. It depends on the situation. Rayudu was smiling, so he hasn’t broken his arm. He has four days now and that should help him,” he added.
