IPL 2020: Chennai stare at the deep end after three consecutive losses
CHENNAI: Chennai Super Kings need 37 runs from nine balls. MS Dhoni is gasping for breath. He is down on his knees, leaning his head on the bat handle. Khaleel Ahmed tries to rattle him further with a short ball and Dhoni mistimes a pull that fetches two runs. His throat is dry now. He even gestures as if he is going to throw up. A physio attends to him.
The Super Kings fans are already on a meltdown in living rooms, on WhatsApp groups, Twitter et. al.
They are already asking where is their team? A team they back every year as if their lives depend on. They expect the team to live up to their expectations every matchday.
Dhoni is on his feet now. He has changed his bat, probably for the third time in the evening. The next ball sails over mid-wicket. Chennai need 29 off seven deliveries.
There is no Bhuvneshwar Kumar. Sunrisers Hyderabad will have to depend on Abhishek Sharma or Abdul Samad to bowl the last over. Dhoni takes a single off the last ball of the 19th over. They need 28 to stop them from losing their third match in a row.
The CSK faithful haven’t given up. They have seen Dhoni take them home from improbable situations against reputed bowlers before.
Surely, he can get these 28 against a rookie like Samad.
An old war horse, Dhoni has been a master of the art at taking the innings deep, to the point where it comes down to him versus the bowler. He believes a level playing field exists when the pressure is equal at both ends. He has come out triumphant on many occasions relying on brutal power.
On Friday, Dhoni charges Samad, who deliberately sends one down the leg, leaving the batsman way out of the crease. Jonny Bairstow fails to gather. The ball races away to the boundary, five wides.
23 needed off 6 now. Samad teases Dhoni by tossing one up. Dhoni wants to muscle it as far as possible. But he doesn't do the desired distance and long-on keeps it two. The second ball is bludgeoned for a straight four. 17 off four now.
Off the next ball, Dhoni sends home a hard truth. He doesn’t connect a length ball properly. As the ball rolls to long-on, he prefers to take the single and leaves it to Sam Curran to do the job.
The same Dhoni, who at his peak and in asimilar situation, would have turned down the single no matter who was at the other end. But this isn’t the same Dhoni. He is 39 now.
His mind is willing, but the body is in no mood to listen. He gets to face another ball, the penultimate one and even then only manages a single. Dhoni has remained unbeaten, but has not taken his side home.
Stop. The. Press? Hell no! The writing was very much on the wall. On an evening where Dhoni tried all he could, let's rewind a little. When he walked in at No 5 in the seventh over, the required run-rate was 9.21. Two overs later it went up to 10.33.
As Ravindra Jadeja joined him and the pair stablised the ship by hitting only two fours and a six between ninth and 14th over, the required run-rate climbed to 17.20 off the last five overs. From there on it only went up like a thermometer in the desert.
It will be harsh to blame Dhoni for the defeat. But it is impossible to look beyond him for repeatedly placing trust on players, who have put him in this situation.
Take Kedar Jadhav for instance. After playing only one match in 2018, he scored only 162 runs in 12 innings with a strike-rate of 95.85 in 2019 On Friday, he batted at No 4.
Middle-order was an issue for Chennai in the 2019 season and they had a chance to address it in the auction. But they chose to bring in Sam Curran, Josh Hazlewood and Piyush Chawla well aware where their problems existed.
Chennai had the option of releasing the likes of Jadhav, Murali Vijay, Suresh Raina and Shane Watson in search of fresh legs.
Especially when the likes of Chris Lynn, Eoin Morgan, David Miller were available.
Instead, Dhoni and Chennai chose not to alter the core and stick with the tried and tested combination. They also had an eye on the big auction, scheduled ahead of the 2021 season.
When they assembled this squad ahead of the 2018 season with many on the wrong side of 30, Chennai knew they had to rebuild completely in three years. But if talk in BCCI circles is anything to go by, that auction could be delayed by a year because the next IPL season is only five months away. That will not be music to Chennai’s ears.
As far as this season is concerned, they need their top-order to be amongst runs as early as possible, else they are en route to losing the tag of being the only team to reach the IPL knockouts in every season they have featured in.