Indian legend Sunil Gavaskar believes Chennai Super Kings got stuck when their former skipper MS Dhoni couldn’t move along with Shivam Dube when they were chasing 181 runs against Punjab Kings at the Brabourne Stadium, Mumbai on Sunday.
Shivam Dube took the aggressive role but surprisingly Dhoni played with a sedate approach despite the fact that the required run rate was climbing up.
Dhoni was on 10 runs off 20 balls at one stage and the pressure kept on increasing on Chennai Super Kings in the run-chase. Chennai was on the ropes as they lost five wickets for only 36 runs on the board and it was always going to be a herculean task for them to get close to 181 runs, let alone chase it.
Meanwhile, Dhoni is well known to take the game deep but there is no doubt that he is well past his peak. The talisman has struggled to rotate strike against the spinners in the early phase of his innings and his mundane batting performance didn’t help CSK against PBKS as they lost by 54 runs, which is their second-biggest loss in terms of runs.
On the other hand, Shivam Dube scored 57 runs off 30 balls but it was always going to be PBKS’ match after CSK was reduced to 36-5.
“With MSD, what you see is that even if he doesn’t start hitting the big ones, he is moving the strike along, getting those ones and twos. He wasn’t quite able to do that this time around. That’s where CSK got stuck just that little bit,” Gavaskar told Star Sports.
“If they had a situation where Shivam Dube was hitting the ball so well, they needed to get a move on along with him. That didn’t quite happen. Look at those some of those dot bills that he played, yes, later on, he made up with the boundaries. “When you are looking to score 20 runs an over, that’s tough for the best of players, it’s not easy.”
On the other hand, former CSK opener Matthew Hayden also felt MS Dhoni was not at his best as his strike rate was only 80 when he needed to score around 200.
“It was a high-class innings from Shivam Dube. Unfortunately, no one could support him. Even MS was off his game a little bit with a strike rate of 80. They were playing catch-up cricket,” he said.
Chennai will next face Sunrisers Hyderabad at the Dr. DY Patil Sports Academy, Mumbai on Saturday.
