MS Dhoni holds a copyright over making late entries count. Mumbai Indians were handed a lesson in that when Dhoni smacked three sixes in a four-ball 20. Next match, Lucknow Super Giants conceded 28 off nine. A 16-ball 37* against Delhi Capitals should have ideally topped both these efforts but Dhoni probably waited too long to kickstart that assault as CSK ultimately lost by 20 runs. Wednesday’s innings was weird though.
Dhoni wasn’t saddled with a chase. The pitch wasn’t easy either. But with CSK’s innings evidently shaping to end sub-par, Dhoni turned down an opportunity to run two. A miscued slice prompted Daryl Mitchell to hare almost to the other end of the pitch when Dhoni asked him to go back. Maybe Dhoni wasn’t fit enough to run two, or perhaps he felt he could convert the remaining three balls better than Mitchell. Either way, that call couldn’t be justified as Dhoni ended up hitting only one six.
But that’s not the only strange thing about Dhoni’s innings. Not being able to put away Rahul Chahar’s leg-breaks in the earlier over had a domino effect on CSK’s innings—Moeen Ali getting bowled off the fourth ball prompting a strange passage of play that made Dhoni look woefully out-of-touch, like he has rarely been before.
Chahar’s line was the key here, making Dhoni reach out every time he bowled to him. Being a heavily bottom-handed batter, Dhoni has never quite mastered the art of mastering the off-side. So, by channelling wide outside the off stump, Chahar ensured that Dhoni didn’t get enough bat under the ball. “I didn’t want to bowl it fuller to him, he hits it well if you push it fuller,” said Chahar after CSK’s innings ended.
That Arshdeep Singh was given a similar brief in the 20th over was evident in the way he was targeting wide outside Dhoni’s arc. Only one low full toss clobbered for a boundary out of the first four balls is good enough for any last over, especially against Dhoni. Sixteen runs off the last two overs, thus, was a rare day of success against CSK despite Dhoni taking the bulk of the strike. In hindsight, CSK’s batting shuffles may not have done Dhoni any favour, what with Mitchell being demoted to No 8 from No 3. Supplanting Ajinkya Rahane with Sameer Rizvi as Impact Player too flopped as he could score only 21 off 23 balls.
That, at a time when CSK didn’t hit a single boundary for 55 balls—the longest stretch this season—perhaps was too large a pretext for Dhoni to react the way he normally does. More, probably because CSK aren’t getting their batting in order, the struggle being more evident after Shivam Dube got a duck and Ravindra Jadeja was dismissed cheaply before the halfway mark.
“So, if you get to six overs, that’s the perfect time for him (Dube) to come in,” said CSK coach Stephen Fleming after their seven-wicket defeat. “The next thing is with left-right (combination), we want Jadeja to come in and take them (the spinners) on as well. But they bowled well. The Rizvi one, we will discuss a little bit more, may go the other way around with that one but again he’s positive and his ability to hit sixes in training has certainly been good. But there’s a temperament part of that as well that young players need to learn. So we have got a bit of information from that.
“The casualty was Mitchell going down the order. What we learnt from the first part of the tournament was that if it goes too low, there are other players—Moeen Ali and MS—who can push the game along. So the window closes there but it was very much getting the tactics right for what we wanted to do in the middle. And that was to break their spinners up but they won that competition.”