New Delhi: Mumbai Indians Ended a disappointing IPL 2026 season and even their hopes of signing off with a victory were not fulfilled as the five-time champions suffered yet another defeat in their last match of the league stage.Mumbai Indians are ninth in the 10-team points table after losing to Rajasthan Royals by 30 runs in their last league game of the season. It was MI’s 10th defeat in 14 matches during a forgettable campaign.After this defeat, the batting coach of Mumbai Indians Kieron Pollard The captain admitted. Hardik PandyaHis tenure at the helm didn’t pan out the way the players or the franchise wanted.“From a leadership point of view about Hardik, yes, it didn’t go the way he wanted as an individual,” Pollard said after the match.“Maybe it wasn’t what we wanted as a management staff. But one thing you have to know is that we did everything we could to give him the best opportunity to lead the franchise, to do well.”Pollard insisted that the dismal season could not be blamed on any one individual and termed it a collective failure of the entire Mumbai Indians group.“Nobody’s going to sit here and point fingers. When you lose, especially, you have to look at it from a collective perspective. You win some, you lose some. But, at the end of the day, I’m not going to question some things,” he said.Pollard added, “He (Pandya) was trying; we were all trying, and it didn’t work for us. You sit back, you talk, (and) see what’s best, you never know what’s going to happen. For us, let’s lick our wounds at this point and hopefully come back stronger in 12 months.”Asked whether Mumbai Indians needed to start over given the number of senior players in the team, Pollard said the franchise would first take time to assess what went wrong before making any decisions.“Right now, it’s not the time and place to talk about it,” he said.“All of these things will be emotional decisions and every aspect of what needs to be thought through, everyone needs the time and space to sit down, to reminisce, to make a fair assessment of where everything really went wrong for us.”“That’s where better decision-making is going to happen. If you just sit here and say you need to do this, you need to do that, that would be irresponsible from a management perspective,” he added.Mumbai Indians finished third in IPL 2025, but the 2026 season saw a dramatic decline for one of the tournament’s most successful franchises.
