Editor’s note: This article was originally published after the first eight matches of CSK in IPL 2018. The charts and data has now been updated at the of the season.
There is something about MS Dhoni this year in the Indian Premier League.
Pre-match, mid-match, post-match – whenever you hear Chennai Super Kings players talk about the former Indian captain, there is one common undercurrent: Dhoni is enjoying his cricket and is striking the ball as well as he ever did.
And it’s hard not to miss it.
Eight matches into IPL 2018, Dhoni has already scored more half centuries than the last two seasons combined, when he played for Rising Pune Supergiant(s). He has surpassed the season’s run tally from 2016, and is four runs shy of crossing 2017’s total. He has hit more sixes this year than he did in the entirety of the last two seasons. He has scored his career-best IPL score as well – an unbeaten 79 against KXIP, where he almost pulled off a miraculous run-chase (which he would go on to do all the same against RCB a few days later).
Second wind
Like only the great players do, just when you thought the days of “Mahi maar raha hai” are going to be few and far between at the fag end of his career, he appears to have found a second wind.
The first two matches of this IPL didn’t offer us a glimpse of what’s coming. Instead, it was a microcosm of Dhoni’s troubles in the recent past. Even the hardcore fan of Dhoni could not have denied the fact that his hitting prowess has been on the wane.
For India, and in the IPL, Dhoni seemed to be evolving into a different type of batsman. Try as he might, he wasn’t the player who could start hitting big from the word go. He needed to bide his time in the middle before he could start striking the ball cleanly. And even then, it wasn’t a guarantee. The run-chases at the Wankhede and Chepauk where instances that reiterated this aspect.
But then, something clicked. We have often been told how Dhoni still belts the ball a long way in practice sessions and we started seeing that in the middle, and it’s not been a one-off.
Sample this: In their new home ground for the rest of the season, CSK were on 91/1 after 10 overs against Mumbai Indians, and they ended up with 169/5 after 20 overs. Dhoni and Co could only manage 78 runs of last 10 overs and that finish ultimately proved decisive in defeat.
Just two days later, however, against Delhi Daredevils, CSK went from 96/0 after 10 overs, to 211/4 after 20 overs – plundering 116 runs of last 10 overs, thanks largely to the hammer-wielding cult hero from Jharkand.
That ability to keep his strike rate consistently high has been a hallmark of Dhoni’s batting this season so far.
Another important feature of this year’s IPL for Dhoni has been the time he has been able to spend at the crease. While he continues to float in the batting order based on the match situation, Dhoni invariably has batted higher up than in the recent past in the IPL as well as in India colours.
Speaking after the win against Delhi Daredevils, Dhoni stressed on the importance of the starts provided by the CSK top order this year so far, and the luxury of having hitters like Dwayne Bravo, Sam Billings to follow him, giving him the freedom to go “have fun” around the ninth or 10th overs of innings.
“I think it’s the platform,” Dhoni said, on the reason for his batting form. “It’s very important for us to get off to a good start, not necessarily in terms of runs, but even a good partnership, and I can promote myself and come out at No 4 or No 5, with batsmen still left to come. When you bat too low in the order, you don’t really know when to go after the bowlers. The bowlers also know in the death overs that you are going to go after every ball. But when you go up earlier, the bowler doesn’t when to expect the big shot, that’s the fun part,” he added, with a cheeky smile.
And the result is the highest number of balls faced per match for Dhoni in his 10-year IPL career so far.
Another issue Dhoni had been facing of late was the frequency with which he could find the boundaries in his innings. Dhoni, in his heyday, had the ability to seemingly flick a switch and change gears in his innings. But he had become increasingly reliant on running between the wickets to help play catch-up with the strike rate. As incredible as it was for a 35-plus cricketer to depend on his sprinting skills, Dhoni was not the feared six-hitter he once was.
Or so many of us thought.
Dhoni has hit 20 sixes this year so far in the 169 balls he has faced – that’s the highest frequency in his IPL career till date. While seven of those came at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in a match that saw 33 sixes being hit, Dhoni has cleared the boundary ropes with ease elsewhere as well.
What he did to Trent Boult in the 17th over of the match against Delhi in Pune was remarkable: with Boult angling the ball away from him, Dhoni walked across early to a short-pitched delivery and pulled the ball on the move. It was marked as a 72-metre six for distance, but a better metric to gauge that shot would have been distance from the ground below. It was one of the flattest sixes you are ever likely to see.
While the numbers help quantify Dhoni’s hitting prowess this year in the IPL, the secret, perhaps, still remains unquantifiable. You can’t put a number to where Dhoni’s head-space is in at the moment, as he is seemingly enjoying every moment when he is out in the middle with that jackhammer of a bat in his hand. That clarity of thought is, arguably, why we are seeing a transformed MS Dhoni for the yellow army this year. Like Faf du Plessis said recently, “Dhoni is absolutely smokin’ it.”
And somewhere in a corner, Ravi Shastri and Virat Kohli will be mightily pleased with that.
(All stats courtesy IPLt20.com as of May 28, 2018)