MS Dhoni did have moments of influence over this game, but the headline belonged to someone else
Alagappan Muthu23-Mar-20241:01
Moody’s message to Gaikwad: ‘Make this your team’
Maheesh Theekshana was wondering where he was supposed to go. He was loitering somewhere at fine leg, halfway to the boundary, trying to catch the captain’s attention.Ruturaj Gaikwad was at mid-off, talking to the bowler Tushar Deshpande. It took a while for him to realise he was needed by somebody else but by the time he looked up, MS Dhoni has already taken care of it.Theekshana was sent to patrol the fence, although he did wait until the captain agreed with . This team has been the extension of one man’s will. A multi-million dollar manifestation of his personality. Until now there was never anybody else. And when there was, it didn’t really work.Related
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Stephen Fleming did say at the pre-match press conference that Dhoni had such a sense for cricket that it would be impossible to turn it off and foolish to let it go to waste. He had a chat with Ravindra Jadeja just before he came on to bowl on Friday. He had been active in setting fields, not necessarily deciding on positions, but the angles. Those 1m, 2m adjustments for which, last season, he said he liked the players to always keep an eye on him. It looks like that instruction might still be valid this year.Throwbacks had been the theme of the night starting with the opening ceremony, where the entertainment arrived on stage riding a zipline like it was 1996 and purveyed grade A nostalgia. A full house was treated to (1998), (1997) and (1998) and then a Chennai Super Kings win over Royal Challengers Bengaluru for the eighth straight match at the MA Chidambaram Stadium. Except in between all the same old things there was a little bit of a revolution.Ruturaj Gaikwad captained a CSK outfit with MS Dhoni in it•BCCICSK gave out four debuts for just this game. That’s only one less than the count for the entire last season. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances. Two of their first-choice players were injured so they had to be replaced. Daryl Mitchell has proven himself in international cricket and so merits a place. But Sameer Rizvi – born almost exactly a year before Dhoni played his first international – making it to a CSK XI on opening day is a significant change of track. Their current captain spent his entire first season with the side warming the bench.This team is changing. It has no choice.Gaikwad seemed to be enjoying his first few minutes rendering CSK in his own way. There were almost half a dozen little field changes in the first three overs and one of them made a lasting impact on the match. He made it together with Mustafizur Rahman. Third on the boundary came up. Cover went back to sweep. It was a response to a batter finding his runs a little too easily; a play made to complicate his process.This was a good surface with enough pace in it. So at the start, CSK assumed that if the ball were to fly, it would go behind square. Faf du Plessis, though, kept finding the boundary in front of it. He hit each of RCB’s eight fours in the first 4.2 overs. So a decision was needed. The bowler seemed to come up with it. The captain agreed. The wicket fell. It wasn’t necessarily a plan – or if was, it was aimed at making the batter access a different area of the field; it was a way to ask more questions of him. And that really is the gist of being captain. Just try to make the other guy mess up.2:54
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That wicket was part of a period where only three of eight overs produced more than a run a ball. And at the end of it, Mustafizur had 4 for 7 and RCB were 78 for 5. Who had that on their bingo card? A fast bowler dominating a home game for CSK. And he still had 12 balls left. There was every chance he could become only the second seamer, since L Balaji in 2008, to pick up a five-for for the Super Kings. It wasn’t to be, but when his work was done, and he was heading off to field at short third, he came to a dead stop and turned around, like you would if someone from behind calls you. Dhoni was the one who was behind. He put his arm around Mustafizur and gave him a pat on the back. These two and their PDA.”I thought he bowled brilliantly,” RCB batter and Chennai boy Dinesh Karthik said, “In all three spells, he showed his skills. He’s bowling a lot quicker than he usually does. So that’s great for him personally. He hit the right lengths. His slower ball came out well. This was a very good pitch. It’s not the usually slow Chepauk turner that we are probably visualising in our mind. The ball skidded on a lot more and it was good for batting and he bowled really well. What makes It really tough is that he can bowl at 138-139kph and he’s got that slower ball which goes to 120-125kph, which makes it really hard to line him up”Towards the close, a packed house wearing yellow started hoping for a wicket to fall. When RCB appealed for a caught behind off Shivam Dube, they were joined by a chorus of thousands. They wanted the No. 6 wearing the No. 7 coming out to bat. They had already seen him do all the other things, including an acrobatic one-handed take where he seemed to just lift off from the ground. That brought the first roar after the first ball. Clearly, the more things change, the more they stay the same, but somewhere Dhoni himself would have been happy with the way this game ended. It contained bits of him – he took two catches and effected a run-out – but the headline belonged to someone else.
