You are trying to manage the chaos: MS Dhoni

MS Dhoni and his band of merry men secured an impressive 1-run win over Bangladesh at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in their Group B fixture of the World T20 2016. Dhoni began the press conference by stating that captaincy in such a situation is all about being able to manage chaos.

“In a situation like this, it’s literally chaos. What you are trying to do is you’re trying to manage chaos,” Dhoni said after the match.

It was also evident that 36-year old Ashish Nehra was in control of proceedings with three deliveries left. What he said to Hardik Pandya, we will never know. However, it was certainly refreshing to see an old pro give advice to a youngster. The plan certainly worked.

“Everybody will come and he’ll have his own opinion. Often the opinion of a batsman is very different to the opinion of a bowler. But what you have to do is you have to see what the strength of the batsman is who is batting at that point of time, how the wicket is behaving, whether there is some kind of reverse swing or no reverse swing on offer. All these things you need to calculate and I feel what really helps is you listen to all of them.

“But at the end of the day, you push the bowler to bowl what you feel is good at that point of time. If I am convinced that this is something I want to do, I will go ahead with it but definitely having an open mind at that point of time really helps because at times in situations like these under pressure, that’s where the input of others comes in. But you have to assess everything and it has to happen in a very short span of time.”

“As far as Hardik is concerned, there is a phase where there would be ups and downs. Once you are through these phases or chapters, you become an accomplished player as a bowler and as a batsman,” he told reporters at the post-match press conference.

“There was quite a few stuff we were discussing, one thing was for sure, we did not want him (Hardik) to bowl a yorker. It had to be a back of a length, but how the back of a length, that was the question. You don’t want to bowl a wide. We were deciding outfield and I think he executed really well,” Dhoni said.

“The batsmen were scoring quite freely at that point of time. I knew I had to take that one over from somebody whether it was a spinner or Hardik Pandya. I said what is important right now is to make a game out of it and that’s where I said I’ll use the proper bowlers at this point of time and we’ll see how many runs are needed in the last over. Then according to that, we’ll decide who is the person who can bowl.

“There were quite a few options. There was Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Hardik Pandya was there. That was the reason behind it. Often it’s quite an easy one. You want to give a cushion of an extra few runs and you go back to your main bowlers, you back their strength and say whatever runs you save it all keeps mounting on the last over and if he’s able to execute his plans then we’ll be on the winning side.”

The Indians have indeed kept their hopes alive with the win. However, they will need a resounding win over the mighty Aussies to cement their place in the semifinals of the World T20 2016.