We would have to put a PIL to judge my performance, jokes MS Dhoni
Indian ODI skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni feels that the team was let down by the inexperienced bowling lineup in the team's tour of Australia. On a lighter vein, the skipper joked about his performance and the conflict of interest issues surrounding Indian cricket.
“There will be a conflict of interest if I start reviewing my performance. We would have to put a PIL to judge my performance as the skipper,” joked MS Dhoni in the post-match press conference, when asked about his captaincy, as reported by The Hindu.
The once flamboyant wicket-keeper batsman, who is increasingly looking a shadow of his former belligerent self, has come under a lot of criticism for India's performances down under. The visitors have already lost the five-match ODI series, and will be now looking to avoid a whitewash.
However, Dhoni feels that leadership is not the issue which is hurting India at the moment – it is the lack of an experienced and consistent bowling lineup in ODIs.
“It is not about the leader. I am captain at the moment and somebody else will come later. It is more important to see the areas we are lacking, the departments which have to improve when it comes to shorter formats.
“We don’t have a seaming all rounder so let’s not even go to that topic. If you see this series it is a relatively inexperienced bowling line-up. Ishant Sharma has played a lot of international cricket but he is not someone who has been consistently part of the format.
“Umesh Yadav has been on and off and there are others who have made their debuts here. So we have to assess right now is how good the individuals are and what are they doing and what’s their rate of development,” Dhoni explained.
India have batted first in all the three ODIs so far, and although they have managed to post decent scores in all the three innings, there is a feeling that lack of proper acceleration towards the end of their innings have let them down. Dhoni has accepted that they were short of runs in the first two matches, but felt that the fielding let them down in the third ODI.
“The three matches were close games. In the first two games we thought maybe 10-15 more runs would have been good. There was definitely pressure on our bowlers, but today the bowling was decent. We let down ourselves with our fielding.
“The best fielders in the group actually left quite a few deliveries and you accumulate those team runs, then the change around could have happened,” added Dhoni.
India dropped Ravichandran Ashwin and Manish Pandey from their lineup in the third ODI, as Gurkeerat Mann and Rishi Dhawan were handed out an opportunity. Dhoni explained that Ashwin's absence from the team was not due to his performance.
“I thought he (Ashwin) bowled well in the last game but it was the only slot available for trade. Because we couldn’t have dropped Ravindra Jadeja and played with Gurkeerat Mann and Rishi Dhawan as that makes batting slightly difficult. We needed that extra bowler also and for that we had to leave Manish Pandey out.
“So that we could bring in Gurkeerat who could bowl 4-5 overs of spin if needed, and that was the reasoning behind it. We also wanted to see what Rishi has to offer and I felt that he bowled decently in this game. With 2-0 down in the series, this was the only game where we could have made these changes,” he said.
In the third ODI, Australia were once in a spot of bother at 215/6, when Ishant Sharma dismissed Matthew Wade in the 39th over. However, Glenn Maxwell played a match-winning innings of 96 (from 83 deliveries) and rescued the hosts from a tricky situation. Dhoni insisted that India were unable to build pressure at that point due to their poor fielding.
“It was an evenly-placed game at that point of time. There was a bit of dew also which meant the wicket would get slightly better. But at the same time, if we would have not given easy boundaries, we would have been able to maintain some kind of pressure that induces a false shot. There were a lot of misfields and that takes the pressure off the batsmen,” said the captain.
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