Defending champions Chennai Super Kings won their first match of IPL 2022, when they beat Royal Challengers Bangalore by 23 runs on Tuesday.
CSK posted a mammoth 216/4 on the board and RCB needed its star batters, Faf du Plessis and Virat Kohli, to get a big score and lay the foundation for the chase. But that didn’t happen as captain du Plessis was sent back in the third over itself.
Just @msdhoni things. 🦁 pic.twitter.com/88ho3S6pbf
— Sharukh (@StanMSD) April 13, 2022
This brought Virat Kohli to the middle and former CSK captain MS Dhoni, who has been aiding new skipper Ravindra Jadeja with field placements from time to time, immediately swung into action. Dhoni has played very closely with Kohli for more than a decade now and knows how the batter responds to certain deliveries.
Keeping this in mind, Dhoni put a fielder at deep square leg for the attempted pull shot, something Virat deploys quite often against the short delivery. As it turned out, Kohli played the pull shot on the first delivery of the fifth over bowled by Mukesh Choudhary and was duly caught at deep mid wicket by Shivam Dube. The entire process of Dhoni setting the field for Kohli was explained in commentary later.
The loss of two quick wickets jolted RCB and they never found their way into the chase, although the middle order did well to take the team closer to the target and saved the net run rate.
MS Dhoni fans have since taken to twitter to laud him. Dhoni has captained CSK to four IPL titles and is the only international captain ever to have won all three global ICC titles.
