Pollard calls time on IPL, stays with Mumbai Indians as batting coach
ONE of the most enduring relationships between a franchise and a player in the IPL has ended.
Five-time champions Mumbai Indians have released Kieron Pollard, their most senior player, to end a 13-year playing career that began in 2010, when they signed Pollard for an undisclosed sum via a tie-breaker that broke the deadlock between four teams.
While Pollard said he would be calling time as a player in the IPL, his relationship with Mumbai is not ending: he has joined them as a batting coach and will play for MI Emirates, owned by the same group, in the ILT20 in the UAE.
Pollard is among a small set of players who have represented only one franchise over their entire IPL careers. The others in the list, with a cutoff of at least 100 matches, are Virat Kohli (Royal Challengers Bangalore from 2008), Sunil Narine (Kolkata Knight Riders from 2011), Jasprit Bumrah (Mumbai from 2013) and Lasith Malinga (who had two stints at Mumbai).
It was Pollard’s explosive hitting, athletic fielding, and smarts with the ball during the 2009 Champions League T20 that drew the collective attention of the IPL franchises. While he set his base price at $200,000 in the 2010 auction, four franchises - Mumbai, Chennai Super Kings, Royal Challengers and Knight Riders - placed the maximum bid of $750,000 for him.
Pollard became the first of two players in the IPL [Shane Bond was the second] to be signed via the silent tie-breaker rule, where franchises were asked to list a price on a blank cheque with the highest bid getting the player’s services.
It was a remarkable turn of fortunes for Pollard, the tall and well-built allrounder from Trinidad & Tobago, who had been left “disappointed” just a year earlier when he went unsold at the 2009 auction despite setting a base price of just USD 60,000.
In a chat with ESPN-cricinfo in 2010, a day after Mumbai paid him a sum estimated to be in seven figures, Pollard said his biggest challenge would be to “sustain what I’ve started as there would be big expectations of me - but cricket is a funny game, it can go any way; I’m just going to go there and play my best.”