MS Dhoni is taking it to the bitter end

New Delhi: In the waning moments of Sunday’s game between Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, Mahendra Singh Dhoni looked old. He looked like he was 43. He looked like a man who had run into a wall. He looked like a finisher who was finished.

In professional sport, you are only as good as your last match. And if there is an iota of truth in that statement, Dhoni’s decreasing returns with the bat should have CSK and his fans worried.

Dhoni is, in the eyes of many, the greatest finisher the game has seen and much of that reputation was not built on his hitting prowess but on the manner in which he would break down a chase. Take it to the last over, wait for the bowler to crack and then finish it. No one else did it like him.

Well, he is still taking it to the end but at the moment, it seems like the bitter end. Perhaps, the problem (and it is our problem, not Dhoni’s) is that we still expect Dhoni to do the same things that he was doing 18 editions back in IPL’s first season.

He isn’t the same player anymore. Still as sharp but physically he isn’t there anymore. On Sunday, when Dhoni walked in to bat, CSK needed 54 off 25 balls. The old Dhoni would have broken it down – 13.5 runs needed, off just over four overs. That is doable. Difficult but not impossible.

But maybe the lack of competitive cricket is holding him back now. He had opportunities but was unable to put them away. This is exactly what Dhoni would thrive on in the past – the moment the bowler would err, he would be punished. RR won by 6 runs on Sunday.

To see him struggle is difficult because, at least in the white-ball game, he always found a way. Could he have batted higher up the order and put pressure on the opposition earlier? Would that have helped CSK?

“Yeah, it’s a time thing,” CSK’s long-time coach Stephen Fleming said. “MS judges it. His body is… his knees aren’t what they used to be. He’s moving okay, but there’s still an attrition aspect to it. He can’t bat ten overs running full stick. So, he will gauge on the day what he can give us. If the game’s in the balance like today, he will go a little bit earlier, and he backs other players when other opportunities are up. So, he’s balancing that.”

Fleming believes Dhoni still brings value to the team. “I said it last year (as well), he’s too valuable to us – leadership and wicketkeeping – to throw him in nine-ten overs. He has actually never done that. So, look, from around 13-14 overs, he’s looking to go depending on who’s in.”

In the game against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on Friday, Dhoni came out to bat at No.9 and his team lost by 74 runs. It was too late to have any impact on the game, and if that is how CSK want to play, it won’t help the team.

Finishing is a problem for the team, so is chasing. And Dhoni isn’t helping. As former India opener Virender Sehwag told Cricbuzz, “For five years, CSK have been unable to chase totals of more than 180.”

Dhoni can still do things that most people will struggle to at 43. He still has his moments,

especially as a keeper, but mostly he struggles to keep up. Part of the problem is also that Dhoni was never someone who came in and started hammering the ball instantly. He would take some time to get his eye in and then have a go.

But in the 2023 season, he faced just 57 balls across 16 matches. In the 2024 season, he faced 73 balls, and this season he has faced 29 balls. For context, between 2008 and 2020, he faced an average of 260.5 deliveries each season.

It seems rather ironical that the man who drove the specialist wicketkeepers out of business due to his batting prowess is now struggling on that front. It’s ironical and it’s sad.

Just before the start of this season, in a press conference in Mumbai, Dhoni had mulled the idea of playing on for a while more.

“I want to enjoy it how I did as a child, when I was in school, when I lived in a colony. I want to play with the same kind of innocence. Easier said than done, but that’s what I have been trying to do,” he had said.

To do all of that, he would’ve needed to play with abandon. But so far, he is playing like a man weighed down by the past and that is far from how CSK would like to remember their Thala.