‘He wasn't the only one who struggled’ – Stephen Fleming on MS Dhoni’s batting during DCvsCSK match

Chennai Super Kings’ head coach Stephen Fleming reckoned that the pitch in Dubai in the match against Delhi Capitals was a tough one for batting. He also had MS Dhoni’s back, saying that the latter wasn’t the only one, who found the going tough in difficult conditions to bat. On Monday, Dhoni scored 18 off 27 at a strike-rate of 66.67 before Avesh Khan dismissed him in the final over.

The CSK skipper came to bat in the ninth over after Robin Uthappa’s dismissal, but could never get going. During his stay in the middle, he couldn’t find the boundary even once. The Super Kings began their innings with a 16-run over from pacer Anrich Nortje, but lost momentum from there on. Fleming admitted that the Yellow Army fell short of what they would have liked to get.

Sometimes you set your sights too high, says Stephen Fleming

“Well, he [Dhoni] wasn’t the only one who struggled. It was a difficult day for strokeplay. When 137 [136] is almost enough, I think it was a tough wicket to score big on in terms of the big shots. So, both teams struggled with that towards the end of the innings.

“Sometimes you set your sights too high, [want] too many, and probably we were only 10-15 runs short of having a match-winning score,” Fleming said after the match.

Fleming mentioned that assessing the conditions at the three venues during the second leg of IPL 2021 has been a challenge. Moreover, he had words of praises for the Capitals’ bowlers for hitting the right channels and not letting the CSK batters run away with the match.

“So, the difficulty at the moment is to assess what the conditions are in all three different grounds and, batting first, getting a score that is par or just above. It was no lack of intent; it was just we had to stabilise after a couple of mistakes and then we were reasonably well-placed for 150. The other thing was their attack bowled very well in the last five overs,” he added.

On October 4, DC beat the Super Kings by three wickets and went back to the top of the points table. CSK, in the meantime, CSK slipped to second after back-to-back defeats.