Defending champions, West Indies, are officially out of the T20 World Cup and skipper Kieron Pollard has admitted the side just wasn’t good enough.
Pollard made these remarks during the post-match conference after losing to Sri Lanka by 20 runs in Abu Dhabi.
According to Pollard, “We play sports, we train hard, we put in the work, we have conversations, but you still have to go out and perform and we have not been good enough – it is as simple as that, it’s like the saying in the Caribbean, you can take the horse to the river but you can’t force them to drink and when guys are batting out there and I am batting out there it’s myself and my teammates against that white kookaburra.”
The two-time title holders have lost three of their four matches so far in Group One with one match remaining.
“I think it is heartbreaking… it is something we have to sit and dissect, a lot of different things might have gone wrong from the start of the tournament, during the tournament, so we still have another game to play,” he said.
Pollard, however, could not say what he thought has been the problem with the team in this tournament but suggested that after the tournament ends, there will be a dissection of the competition to see where it went downhill.
He stated, “We can look at all sorts, we can look at age, we can look at mobility, we can look at everything in a negative light and my question would be what if it didn’t happen. Obviously, we have to face the fact we weren’t good enough so I am not going to sit here and blame those things. We will have a time where we will sit back and have a post mortem with what went wrong.”
Shimron Hetmyer (81 not out) and Nicholas Pooran (46) were the only West Indies batsmen to reach double figures against Sri Lanka.
“This is what we know Shimron can do, he comes in, maneuvers the ball at the start, and he is a powerful individual and if we can get these sorts of performances from these guys consistently then I think it will all go well for us in the future,” he said.
Chris Gayle has scored 13, 12, 4, and 1, so far while Evin Lewis was dismissed for 6, 56, 6, and 8. Andre Russell has also failed to score twice in four innings while making 5 and 2 in the other two innings. The captain himself has scored 6, 26, 14 not out, and duck.
The all-rounder explained that a lot of times persons question why some of these players are not playing for the West Indies and when they do, then there are questions as to why they have not performed.
“I keep saying we are disappointed, guys have not performed, guys have not done well, guys have not done justice to their talents and we have not done justice as a West Indies team so we take that on the chin and we move on,” he reckoned while adding, “We have not been able to come out of trouble or we have not been smart enough in different scenarios and we have to accept that.”
Pollard was not having the excuse of lack of preparation, highlighting that there were three home series as well as the Caribbean Premier League and Indian Premier League prior to this tournament.
