MS Dhoni: God has given me lot of power

Mohali: Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s powerful forearms won many a matches for India and no wonder the former India captain has confidence to clear the boundary even when he is suffering from excruciating back pain. For lofted shots, a batsman needs to maintain shape while transferring body weight into the shot.

However against Kings XI Punjab last night, the Chennai Super Kings captain was in real pain but kept clearing the ropes with consummate ease. Dhoni’s unbeaten 79 off 44 balls got CSK agonisingly close to the target before the visitors fell short by four runs. When asked how he could hit those lofted shots with a painful back, Dhoni replied: “The back is pretty bad but God has given me lot of power and I don’t need to use my back a lot. My arms can do the job.”  However Dhoni maintained that it was not a very serious injury. “It shouldn’t be too bad because I know what happened. And when you know the extent of your injury, you know how bad it really is,” he said.

On areas CSK need to improve, Dhoni said: “Fielding, we can’t improve, so I won’t really say that. So, we’ll be a safe fielding side; we won’t be an extraordinary fielding side. We’ll just have to make sure that when we are under the pump from the batsmen, what are the boundaries that we can omit, what are the easy deliveries that we are not supposed to give because good batsmen will hit you and throughout the IPL it is something they will have to go through. Just that if you keep cutting one or two boundaries here and there, at the end of the game, you’ll realise those were the six or eight runs that really made the difference.”