India bat first. The team loses early wickets. Dhoni comes in.
2004 to 2006 Dhoni would hit at least a boundary in an over and would play aggressive shots for those singles.
(2004-135.71, 2005-103.11, 2006-92.97)
2007 to 2017 Dhoni would gently touch the ball and make sure to convert ones to twos, thereby scoring 12 runs from six balls with ease. He will wait for the bad delivery to smash it out of the park.
(2007- 89.60, 2008- 82.29, 2009-85.57, 2010-78.94, 2011-89.88, 2012-87.62, 2013-96.04, 2014-92.07, 2015-86.83, 2016-80.11, 2017-84.73)
2018 to 2019 Dhoni isn’t doing what he normally does. This Dhoni plays dots, and smashes the bad ball out of the park. Those dots hurt his strike rate.
(2018- 71.42, 2019-79.76. From Jan 1 to the start of World Cup- 78.22)
All these years, especially, in the mid-year of his career, Dhoni used to take time, analyse the conditions yet used to pick up quick singles and twos and unleash himself in the final overs of the match. For the last two years, Dhoni has been hitting the balls in the final overs but he isn’t converting singles to twos which he usually does.
But it’s Dhoni. Of course, his strike rate isn’t perfect right now. He isn’t as good as he used to be for India with the bat right now. Also, nobody of our generation knows the conditions better than him. He knows what works and what doesn’t. He has targets fixed in his mind already after seeing the conditions. He mentally sees through everything. Most of the times it works and of course, there are times where it fails, a few times miserably. Still, he is one of the best if not the best cricketing minds of our generation, a legend in this format of the game. As Kohli said he has won a lot of games for us and he knows how.
Still, I badly wish he makes sure to improve his strike rate as well because I want him to end his career on a great height. After all, he deserves it.
Former Australian Cricketer Dean Jones passes away