MS Dhoni played a masterstroke: The opening game of IPL 2020 saw Chennai Super Kings taming Mumbai Indians in stunning fashion after their bowlers did a decent job and Ambati Rayudu joined forces with Faf Du Plessis to safely score the required runs. With all said and done, Chennai had a game-changer towards the end of their innings that made the task easy for the Yellow Army and that was Sam Curran.
With 29 needed from 18 balls and Krunal Pandya bowling the crucial 18th over, Jadeja got out to a straight delivery that saw him getting beaten by pace. Everyone expected MS Dhoni to walk out in the middle and get the job done for Chennai. However, this is when the twist arrived with the captain MS Dhoni sending Curran in the middle, startling everyone.
Curran isn’t a certified finisher and he definitely wasn’t as big of a hitter like MS Dhoni. However, it was Curran who dealt the most destructive blows of all to Mumbai as his 6-ball-18 left the defending champions derailed.
Pandya is a bowler who gets the ball moving away from the right-hander. Now throw a southpaw in the mix and the ball will come inside, thereby making things easier for the batsman to strike. This was exactly the move that MS Dhoni deployed.
Also keeping in mind, that Curran may not be a certified finisher, but he can hit big too, Dhoni went for this gritty gamble. It reaped handsome dividends as the left-hander took Krunal Pandya to the cleaners with zero mercy.
The special one that came out of Curran’s arsenal was the late cut that he deployed against a short ball from Krunal. With the required run-rate close to 10 for Chennai Super Kings before the arrival of the English all-rounder, this blitzkrieg from Curran did the damage to Mumbai’s remaining hopes of turning it into a thriller, in the end, emulating the preceding year’s final.
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