Former India player Sunil Gavaskar has said that it was unfortunate to see MS Dhoni was not able to finish the chase when he was playing with Shivam Dube and he was hitting it big in their unsuccessful chase of 181 against Punjab Kings on Sunday in Mumbai. With this, CSK suffered their 3rd successive defeat, which is also their worst start to an IPL season as well.
Shivam Dube and MS Dhoni added a 62-run stand and keep CSK in the race where Dube scored a fifty with 3 sixes and 6 boundaries – 57 from just 30 balls but he fell in the 15th over off Liam Livingstone who did well with the bat also. While talking about Dhoni, Gavaskar said that Dhoni could have done better if he managed to rotate the strike. Dhoni scored 23 off 28 after being caught down the leg off Rahul Chahar.
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“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,” Sunil 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.”
However, Sunil Gavaskar also added that there will a huge pressure on the newly-appointed captain Ravindra Jadeja after the poor start to their campaign. Meanwhile, CSK will play their next game against SunRisers Hyderabad at the DY Patil Stadium in Mumbai.
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“Surprise, big surprise. They have always been a team who were able to make comebacks. This time they have lost 3 matches on the trot. The new captain will be under tremendous pressure, yes he has got MSD to support him, but at the end of the day, the buck will stop with him with CSK haven’t won anything at the moment. You need to turn it around very, very quickly. They can do it, there are 11 more games to go. We saw what happened with KKR last year,” Sunil Gavaskar concluded.
