Mark Boucher blames Mumbai Indians' fans for Hardik Pandya's and team's downfall in IPL 2024
Published - 18 May 2024, 12:01 PM | Updated - 23 Aug 2024, 01:11 AM
Mumbai Indians head coach Mark Boucher was sympathetic towards Hardik Pandya after the franchise finished last in the IPL. It was the second time in the last two seasons that Mumbai Indians finished last on the points table of IPL.
Nothing went right for the franchise this season. From MI's call to announce Hardik Pandya as the skipper to the form of Rohit Sharma, Ishan Kishan, Surykumar Yadav nothing sat right.
The only positive from the season was Jasprit Bumrah's bowling form ahead of the T20 World Cup. The speedster ended with 20 wickets and was unplayable at times in the season.
Addressing the press conference after the last match defeat for MI against LSG, Mark Boucher said that Hardik's performance was affected by how he was not welcomed by the Mumbai Indians fans after the change in captaincy.
He further said that the team's performance was affected by the same as well. To make matters worse, Pandya was banned for one match after his team was penalized due to a slow overrate. He will now miss MI's first game of the IPL 2025 campaign.
"It wasn't great hearing all the boos. Certainly, I felt sorry for Hardik as well. It's never nice to go through something like that. So yeah, there are certain things we need to address. And we are going to address them."
"Now is not probably the right time. Everyone is very disappointed and emotional, so no good decision will get made in the nearest sort of time. We need to go back. We need to evaluate exactly what's going on" Boucher said.
Mark Boucher Sums Up The Season For Mumbai Indians, Sympathises With Hardik Pandya
The MI coach further said that it was a disappointing campaign for Mumbai Indians and that the management would address the issues and make some "good calls" ahead of the next season.
"[There are] things that we need improvement on, whether on the field or off the field stuff,". We've got some great heads within the management team as well, and we'll sit down and we'll find a way of how to make it better ultimately for the players to produce the sort of cricket that we know these players can produce, which was under par this season," Boucher said.
"There were a lot of things happening, a lot of moving parts this season, which wasn't great to be a part of at certain times. Certain things did affect individuals, which ultimately did affect the team. So those are the sort of things we need to sit down and address and hopefully make some good calls going forward as well to address the off-field stuff" he further added.
Hardik had a disappointing season with the bat scoring just 216 runs at an average of 18.00 in 14 games. In MI's loss to LSG, he scored just 16 off 13 balls when he had an opportunity to win the game for his side.
" Did not play good quality cricket, eventually cost us the whole season. It's a professional world. Have to always come out and put our best foot forward. But yes, as a group we could not play quality cricket or smart cricket. Too early to point out what went wrong. The whole season kind of went wrong. We can pass this game as another one (that went wrong)" said Hardik reflecting on the loss and the entire season for MI after the match.
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Anshuman Roy is an author at Cricketaddictor. He has been working with the organization since Januar...
