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Getting a glimpse of Dhoni the enforcer
Dhoni with the bat was a refreshing change but he also has to handhold CSK through this transition.
Chennai Super Kings (CSK) sent out a different captain at the toss for only the second time since its formation in 2008 but MS Dhoni is still their undisputed leader. But what CSK may have now done is freed Dhoni a bit more as a batter, the immediate effect of which was seen on Saturday when Dhoni pulled CSK out of doldrums while Ravindra Jadeja was coming to terms with captaincy as his side slid to 61/5 in the 11th over. The match was lost but Dhoni the batting enforcer may have just been resuscitated.
“It (Dhoni scoring a fifty) was good but it would have been nice if the top order had fired,” CSK head coach Stephen Fleming said in a virtual press conference after the match. “The depth we have got in our batting is a positive. And certainly MS getting runs early in the tournament is a positive. But it was a pretty rusty tournament all up. It was positive but there is a lot of improvement there.”
Dhoni was always relied upon to start cautiously and Saturday’s innings too wasn’t different on that note. But where Dhoni lost some edge—particularly in 2021 where he finished with his worst IPL strike rate—was in not being able to convert those slow starts. In 2019 and 2020, Dhoni was out just four times in his first 10 balls, scoring less than run a ball. In 2021 alone he matched that four times, and scored at just 6.2 runs per over.
Dhoni’s batting template remains the same—defend against the spinners and go after the pacers. On a Wankhede pitch that was gripping at times, he scored 12 off his first 20 balls but 38 from the next 18. But these are absolute numbers compiled only at the end of his innings. In real time, Dhoni on 15 off 25 balls with a sacrilegious strike rate of 60—along with a false shot percentage of 30% according to CricViz—was the worst kind of foreboding, considering his last few seasons. But with the dew setting in, Dhoni was banking on making the most off the faster bowlers. That he could still do that with no practice in domestic or international cricket is what still makes Dhoni such an enigma.
CSK ended at least 15-20 runs short of the par total but Dhoni did part of his job. The bigger, and far more pertinent, component of his job is to handhold CSK through this inevitable phase of transition migrating to the leadership of Jadeja. “We talked about it. It's been something MS and I talked about during the last season,” Fleming said. “The timing was MS’s call. I think it's been documented that he wanted to give Jadeja the clean slate going into the series so it was communicated with Mr. Srinivasan and conveyed to the team. We 100% respect that.”
“There's going to be a bit of a transition period as we develop the relationship with Jadeja and also have MS there so you don't just discard a player just because he doesn't have the captaincy tag. You develop the new captain and work with the experience we've got, and thankfully we've got quite a bit of that. It's a little bit of change, but we'll work through that.”
