Kieron Pollard's power-packed 87 not out off 34 balls (6x4s, 8x6s) steered Mumbai Indians (MI) to four wickets in a last-ball thriller over Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League at the Arun Jaitley Stadium here on Saturday night.
CSK put on a mammoth 218/4 on the board, but the side's coach Stephen Fleming insisted that the side was still 10 runs short.
"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," said Fleming in a virtual press conference.
"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.
"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," Fleming further said.
The former New Zealand skipper wants CSK to keep making the most of the middle overs in the upcoming games.
"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," he added.
"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," said Fleming.
