Royal Challengers Banaglore wicketkeeper opening batsman Parthiv Patel has said that he was surprised to see MS dhoni missing the last ball un in the thrilling Indian Premier League tie on April 21.
Needing two runs to win on last ball and one for the tie , Parthiv Patel made a run out to hand RCB a win that they were not expecting after MS Dhoni had slammed 24 runs of first five balls from Umesh Yadav.
“We honestly wanted him (Dhoni) to hit through the off-side on the shorter side of the ground. If he had hit it on the leg-side, there were two runs because I don’t think the way he runs, there was any chance of stopping those two,” Parthiv Patel quoted by agencies.
“So we wanted (Umesh) to bowl slower and outside the off-stump and surprisingly he missed it. I wasn’t expecting him to miss it but surprisingly he missed it,” he said.
Parthiv Patle said that when MS Dhoni is in the middle in run chases anything is possible as takes game deep as much as possible to give himself chance in final over.
“We wanted to bowl as many dot balls to him as possible, and put pressure on other batsmen because everybody knows how MS is. He wanted the game to go down to last three-four overs and he almost won the game,” said Patel.
Meanwhile CSK needed 36 runs in the last two overs with Dhoni and Dwayne Bravo in the middle. Eyebrows were raised when Dhoni refused three singles in the penultimate over, bowled by Navdeep Saini, with the asking rate hovering around the 17 runs per over mark. CSK lost the match by one run.
Defending his decision of not running singles he said, “”I think it was still difficult at the death,” Dhoni said, in a post-match interview.
“If you bowl that back of a length it was slightly spongy, it was not really coming on to the bat, which meant the new batsman who would have come, he would have also found it slightly difficult.
“Since I have played so many balls, I can afford to take that risk, because a lot of runs were needed. I think 10 or 12 deliveries, we needed some close to 40 runs or 36 runs or something like that, which meant a lot of boundaries were needed.
“So yes, right now you can calculate, two runs over there, one run over there, and we are through, because we lost by one run, but at the same time what you have to see is what if there were a few dot balls, whether we could have got those extra boundaries or not.”