He has made a habit of coming good when the chips are down and Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni feels his excellent finishing skills have a lot to do with the good cricketing sense he is “blessed” with.
“I think I am blessed with a bit of good cricketing sense. I knew I could get 15 runs off the last over, I’m happy that it worked,” said the beaming captain. “I went with a heavy bat, the weight was perfect for slogging,” he added.
After bowling out Sri lanka for 201, India rode on Dhoni and Rohit Sharma’s half century to chase down the target. “15 players have been very good on the field and that is a good sign,” he added. “The opposition bowler (Shaminda Eranga) was not the most experienced in that last over unlike (lasith) Malinga, so I thought I would take my chances.”
Dhoni also made a point that boring cricket, if it ensures a victory for his team, is sometimes necessary. “At times in these low scoring matches, you need to play boring cricket. It doesn’t matter whether you win in the 48th or 49th over,”
The skipper admitted that since it was the final, he took the risk of playing despite not having fully recovered from his hamstring injury. “Sometimes you don’t really wait to be 100 hundred percent fit. The problem with hammy (hamstring) injury is that there is a chance of re-occurence. Since it was the final and we have two months off after this, I thought about taking the risk,” he said.
The witty side of the skipper came to the fore when asked about him scolding Ishant Sharma for misjuding a single and risking getting run-out in the process. “The problem with tall fast bowlers is that there is a lot of distance between the brain and the receptors,” Dhoni answered.