The veteran Indian off-spinner Harbhajan Singh took a dig at former Indian coach Greg Chappell who recently spoke about MS Dhoni’s finishing skills. In a recent interaction on the Facebook handle of the Playwrite Foundation, the latter credited himself for helping MS Dhoni blossom into a calculative finisher.
Chappell recalled a match against Sri Lanka in 2005 and said he had challenged Dhoni not to play shots in the air when the India wicket-keeper batsman was taking the bowlers to the cleaners. Chappel said he always challenged Dhoni to ‘finish games’ for India and the latter would have a huge smile on his face whenever he got the team past the finish line.
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Responding to the comments on Dhoni, Harbhajan wrote: “He asked Dhoni to play along the ground coz coach was hitting everyone out the park.. He was playing different games #worstdaysofindiancricketundergreg (sic).”
Chappell, stressing that Dhoni is the best finisher he has ever seen, said: “I remember his knock of 183 against Sri Lanka and how he tore them apart. It was power hitting at its very best. The next match was in Pune. I asked MS, ‘why don’t you play along the ground more instead of trying to hit every ball to the boundary’. We still needed 20 runs to win and Dhoni asked me, through 12th man RP Singh if he could hit sixes. He finished the game with a six.”
Greg Chappell’s tenure as the head coach of the Indian cricket has often been termed as the worst phase of Indian cricket as it included the highly-publicized rift with the then India captain Sourav Ganguly. Chappell did not have a good working relationship with some of the senior members, including Sachin Tendulkar.
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However, describing his move of helping in the appointment of Greg Chappell, Ganguly said, “Hiring him was the biggest mistake of my career. I had known a different person from a stint as my batting coach in Australia. I don’t know what led to our relationship breaking down. After the 2007 World Cup, I haven’t interacted with him.”
