West Indies skipper Kieron Pollard has quashed talks about his retirement following the ICC T20 World Cup debacle for the defending champions, saying "there's a lot of mileage in my legs", though the 34-year-old all-rounder is highly disappointed with the ageing warhorses, commenting that "you can carry the horse to the river but you can't force them to drink".
West Indies' campaign in the UAE started with a crushing 'Super 12' defeat at the hands of England, and Sri Lanka struck a lethal blow with a 20-run win here on Thursday evening, sending the two-time champions packing early.
A lot of talk during the post-match press conference was on the ageing fleet of hard-hitters and Pollard said that there will certainly be a post-mortem of the losses.
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"We can look at age, we can look at mobility; we can look at everything in a negative light or whatever. We have to face the fact that we weren't good enough, so I'm not going to sit here and blame all those factors. We (will) sit back and have a post-mortem as to what actually went wrong. But you know, some of these guys in all honesty have still performed around the world, and yes, as I said, we were disappointed.
"For us, I keep saying we are disappointed and guys have not performed and guys have not done well and guys have not done justice to their talents and we have not done justice as a West Indies team," said Pollard.
Pollard categorically said that he was not going to quit international just yet, but added that the decision was not really in his hands.
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"Unless you are part of the decision that is going to get rid of me or fire me or retire me, as I stand right now, I have no intentions of not playing international cricket. One tournament or a couple bad games don't make a summer. For me personally, there's a lot of mileage in my legs other than individual. There are people in the front scenarios who make decisions and I can't, when it comes to that question, I can't make that decision.
"But again, we have a tendency as things go badly, the easiest thing for us to do is look for things to blame and chop and change and do different things."
Asked why despite his best efforts, including interacting with players and working on other 'stuff' for the improvement of the side, the team had performed miserably, the all-rounder said that the simplest explanation was that the side was not good enough.
"We train hard. We put in the work. We have conversations, all right. But you still have to go out and perform. And we have not been good enough. And it's as simple as that. As we say in the Caribbean, you can carry the horse to the river but you can't force them to drink. When guys are batting out there, or myself is batting out there, it's myself and my teammates against that white kookaburra, and we have not been able to come out of trouble and we have not been able or we have not been smart enough in the front scenarios, and that's what it is."
