JOIN USWhile admitting that the Chennai Super Kings may just have erred in opting to bowl first, coach Stephen Fleming said the Mumbai Indians played a flawless game in the IPL-8 final here on Sunday.
“They played well, didn’t they?,” asked Fleming after his team went down by 41 runs while chasing Mumbai’s 202/5 at the Eden Gardens. “I thought they were excellent. We wanted to bowl first. We thought it was a new pitch and there was talk about grass on it. We had watched a lot of games that Kolkata had played and decided that was the best option for the side, if we got some assistance. We started beautifully and then we got a little bit loose. Rohit Sharma is in great form and Lendl Simmons has been playing well and they just quickly grew momentum. We just weren’t good enough to stop it. I think the game that they played from about the second over on was almost faultless. It was a very good performance from them and we just stuttered and it was probably very similar to the last five or six games we have played. We weren’t at our best, we were just trying to hang on but it wasn’t good enough,” he remarked.
Fleming also agreed that Super Kings were below par through most part of the season. “It feels like that, and it is not meant to be disrespectful in any way,” he noted. “It felt like we never got going. We had one dominant batting performance when McCullum got a hundred, the rest of the games have been on in pitches in Chennai which have been hard work. Sort of 140-160 have been good scores and it has been very hard work restricting teams and it sort of gave an impression and felt to us that it was very tough. No one was in full flow and we have got batters who like the ball coming on and can score freely. It was just a very difficult season, we really had to graft our way through. We were pleased with the way we adapted; I think to be top of the table is a good achievement but obviously we were looking further ahead. And the team that we had picked to play, we were looking forward to spin conditions in Ranchi if things didn’t work out in Mumbai, and here, which has been spin dominated. The fact was that it was a good pitch but it wasn’t as spinner friendly as we had hoped,” he analysed.