MS Dhoni, Chennai Super Kings’ skipper played a brilliant knock of 26 runs off 11 deliveries and powered his team to second win of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2025 on Monday (April 14). In the match played at the Ekana Stadium, Lucknow, CSK won against LSG by five wickets.
CSK are currently placed at the bottom of the Points Table after managing to win just two out of the seven matches played. Their performance this season has been underwhelming with an NRR of -1.276. Dhoni, who was named as the Player of the match in the clash against LSG, reflected on why his team was not winning at their home ground.
MS Dhoni on Chepauk’s pitch
Dhoni expressed that according to him the slowness of the pitch at their home ground, MA Chidambaram Stadium might have contributed to the batters’ struggles.
If you see the powerplay, whether it was the combination or the conditions, we were struggling with the ball. And then we weren’t able to get the start we wanted as a batting unit. Also the fall of wickets. We keep losing wickets at the wrong time to some extent. One of the reasons could be that the Chennai wicket is slightly on the slower side. When we have played away from home, the batting unit has done slightly better. Maybe we need to play on wickets that are slightly better so that it’ll give the batters confidence to play their shots.
MS Dhoni on winning a match after a losing trot of 5 games.
Dhoni spoke about how important it was to win the game against LSG and how it will boost the confidence of the players.
“It’s good to win a game. When you play a tournament like this, you want to win games. Unfortunately, the earlier matches didn’t go our way for whatever reasons. There can be lots of reasons. It’s good to have a win on our side. Gives confidence to the whole team and helps us improve in areas we want to improve. We all knew that when it doesn’t come your way in cricket, God makes it very tough, and it was a tough game,” he said.
MS Dhoni on the team’s strategy in the game
“You don’t want to play timid cricket. We were putting too much pressure on Ash. He was bowling two overs in the first six. We made changes and this looks like a better attack. As a bowling unit, we’ve done well. As a batting unit, we can do better,” he said.
