West Indies captain, Kieron Pollard sayd that his side lacked fight and courage during the first One Day International (ODI) against Australia Tuesday.
The hosts kept Australia to 252 for nine but were routed for 123 in 26.2 overs.
During a press conference yesterday, Pollard was clear not to make any excuses for the batting performance despite the team missing the services of Shai Hope, Fabien Allen and Roston Chase who all suffered injuries before the match.
“I was disappointed with our overall batting performance by all of us, not being able to chase down 250 runs. But the position that we were in, as I said in the post-match, I think we didn’t show enough fight and courage. They are going to come hard at us.It is an experienced bowling attack that they have and we have to fight as individuals and a team when we are out there so I am not going to pinpoint and blame anyone,” he stated.
Pollard added, “Obviously performances like that sometimes you don’t have words to actually come up with how to describe it.
I think it was there for everyone to see. We didn’t have that sort of fight from a batting perspective.”
The 34-year-old, who is still battling a hamstring niggle, was surprised to be walking to the crease in the fifth over, highlighting that even in T20s, it was shocking to see him at the crease so early. However, his early change in mindset from a T20 format to a 50-over format aided him well as he went on to topscore with 56.
He reasoned, “When you get time off like that, you get the opportunity to reflect on your game and it’s a mindset.
Obviously I knew that I wouldn’t participate in the T20 games after the way we went in the first couple games and I sort of already geared my mind to the One-Day format and what was needed so most of my net sessions were geared around that.”
The captain rationalized that the Caribbean side was unable to adapt to the high quality bowling that was presented Tuesday night, especially the threat of Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazelwood in the opening overs of the contest.
It was Starc and Hazelwood who broke the back of the batting order early on and they ended with figures of 5-48 and 3-11 respectively.
The all-rounder admitted that not much could be done ahead of today’s second ODI which bowls off at 14.30 hours in Barbados, from a practice perspective but rather meaningful discussions could be had in order to curb the efforts of the opening bowlers.
“Hopefully, with a couple of discussions because you can’t change much overnight in terms of a practice perspective, but let’s look at it that way and see what happens in the next ODI,” he said.
“We just have to come up with better plans on how we are going to do it. We know for a fact that the first couple of deliveries Starc is going to swing the ball back into the right handers and away from the left handers, so technically we have to set ourselves up for that and see what happens,” he declared.