IPL 2018 | Teams win competitions but individuals can win finals, says Stephen Fleming

05/27/2018

Stephen Fleming believes that teamwork is important to win a tournament but it’s the individual performances that can turn the matches like finals on its head. CSK have been fortunate of getting brilliant individual performances throughout the season, which has helped them reach the final of IPL.

Chennai Super Kings has been one of the most consistent team throughout the IPL and one of the key reasons of it has been the individual players like Ambati Rayudu, MS Dhoni, Shane Watson etc, who have stepped up when the team needed it the most. Stephen Fleming believed that they need one more special performance in the final against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Sunday at Wankhede Stadium to win the title.

CSK and SRH have met each other thrice in the ongoing edition of the league and each time CSK has been able to hold the edge over SRH, maintaining a 3-0 lead on them. Fleming praised Rayudu, who has scored 586 runs in 15 matches, for the kind of form he has displayed this season, helping CSK’s cause to win matches. He also pointed out that Rayudu has not been the only player that team has relied on and there have been many match winners for CSK, the latest of those match-winners being Faf du Plessis, who scored unbeaten 67 runs off 42 balls. He stressed the need of getting individual brilliance from players and felt that one good performance from any one player in his squad can actually turn the match in CSK's favour.

"Rayudu has been very good. He's been one of the number of players that have contributed to match-winning performances and there have been a few. To see him get some game time and grow in confidence and the way in which he has done it has been very rewarding from a coach's point of view," Fleming said at the press conference as quoted by India Today.

"But he's been one of a number and that's probably been a characteristic of our campaign that we needed these many players to stand up. Faf (du Plessis) was the last example but there have been others all the way through so the load has been shared, we had the usual culprit beside me (referring to Dhoni) for a number of times but the load really has been shared throughout the tournament," he added.

In the much awaited final on Sunday will mostly be a clash between Hyderabad's bowling and Chennai's batting. With the likes of Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Rashid Khan, and Siddarth Kaul, the orange army boasts of a superb bowling attack whereas the yellow brigade is full of star-studded batting line-up comprising Watson, Dhoni, Rayudu, Suresh Raina and others. All the batsmen have delivered for Chennai whenever the side needed it. But Fleming knows the threat that SRH possess and is aware of the fact that beating them for the fourth successive time this season won't be an easy task for CSK.

"Teams win competitions but individuals can win finals so we are looking again for that match-winning performance and it's going to have to come because the opposition (Sunrisers Hyderabad) is very good. We have seen that in all of our occasions against them and again last (Friday) night.

"They've got some real threats that we have to nullify just like we have some threats that they'll be working on. It's a great final and the players like Rayudu are looking forward to one more performance and that's the exciting part about this part of the tournament that one player can shift a game," Fleming said.

IPL 2018 | Teams win competitions but individuals can win finals, says Stephen Fleming

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