“Chennai Super Kings apne IPL ke saare matches home ground pe hi khelti hai.”
Khaleel Ahmed expressed it well. That CSK basically plays all of their matches at home, given the level of support they receive everywhere they go.
It was no different in Visakhapatnam on Sunday, when the crowd that was supposed to support the Delhi Capitals at their “home” stadium was tinted yellow. Chants of “Dhoni! Dhoni!” reverberated across the stadium from time to time, even while MS Dhoni, the man behind CSK’s cult-like pan-India fanbase, was nowhere to be found.
Those cries, as lovely as they were, must have sounded familiar to Rishabh Pant. He has spent a big portion of his short career listening to them.
Whether it was at his home stadium in Delhi in 2019, when he failed DRS reviews, or in Rajkot, when he botched Litton Das’ stumping, familiar shouts of “Dhoni! Dhoni!” rang out in the fans, reminding Pant of the grandeur of the shoe size he set out to fill. They didn’t stop in Thiruvananthapuram when he dropped Evin Lewis, and they were probably the loudest in Mohali when he squandered not one but two stumping opportunities.
So, five years later, when Pant arrived in Visakhapatnam to take the toss as captain of the Delhi Capitals, he was well aware of the enormity of the challenge before. He talked to Ian Bishop about putting on a really excellent performance to “turn the crowd around,” and he did, batting his way to a welcome half-century accompanied by Dhoni cheers.
Pant’s performance while walking in at No.3 made it even more spectacular, but it was far from a smooth transition to the batting position. He was 23 off 23 deliveries at one stage, struggling to time the ball as well as the rest of the world expects him to. At the moment, he just had three overs left in the innings to catch up against the likes of Mustafizur Rahman and the promising Matheesha Pathirana, the latter of whom had just bowled two 150 kph yorkers that Mitchell Marsh and Tristan Stubbs couldn’t handle.
But Pant made the task appear effortless, sometimes without even using both hands. Like the six he smashed off Mustafizur’s slower delivery, which cut back in sharply and had Pant diving over to the off-side. But the feet stayed stationary, the hips turned, and the hands swung as one came off the bat handle and the other continued with the shot. And a shot that was.
“I took my time initially because I haven’t played much cricket in the last one and a half years, so I thought I’ve to give myself enough time,” Pant said after the game, “but at the same time I kept believing that I could change the match.
“I love to be on the field and this is something I have depended my life on… [but] 1.5 years was [a long wait]. But you gotta keep doing what you can as a cricketer and keep learning from it. I had a self belief that whatever happens, I need to come back on the ground. Apart from that thought process, I didn’t think much.
While it was exciting to see the wicketkeeper-batsman score 13 runs off Mustafizur’s six deliveries, it was his duel with the fast and slingy Matheesha Pathirana that drew attention.
Pathirana bowled a brilliant 19th over, but it was far from his greatest performance of the day. Earlier in his spell, he attempted an encore of the yorkers and threw them an inch too short or too full, and all Pant needed was that slightest of errors in length to elevate DC from a par score to an excellent total.
Pathirana’s message reads 6, 4, 4, W. The quick near-yorkers were pumped for sixes, which ultimately proved to be the difference between the sides.
“It was excellent batting,” CSK coach Stephen Fleming said of that phase in play. “Pathirana had come off an excellent over in the over before, so quite rightly so he was lining up the wickets. Not many in the world who can do what Rishabh Pant did.
“Pathirana has had a lot of success and it was a good contest. It showed that Pant has still got a lot of natural flair and that he played really well. If we were able to restrict them to 170 something, we’d have walked off pretty happy but the extra 12-15 runs were quite crucial in the end.”
In many ways, it was quietly poetic that Pant batted DC to their first points of the season while being up against not one but two showstoppers. Because once Pathirana was done with uprooting his fair share of stumps on the night, Dhoni turned the clocks back with vintage shots, including an encore of his six over extra cover from the Vizag epic. It might not have been enough to win CSK the game but it got the partisan crowd going.
Dhoni wrapped up the innings with a flurry of big hits as the chants of his name grew louder at the venue. Once again, Pant was in the middle while “Dhoni! Dhoni!” did the rounds. But somewhere deep down, they must have been deeply comforting for the 26-year-old, someone who’s had to build a career to that background score and someone who’s now starting to write his own scripts to that tune all over again.
