Yash Dayal holds his nerve at the death to dismiss Dhoni

RCB needed to beat CSK by 18 runs at the Chinnaswamy Stadium last night (May 18) to qualify for the IPL 2024 playoffs at the expense of CSK. At one point, CSK needed 63 in four overs to qualify, but Ravindra Jadeja and MS Dhoni brought the target down to 17 from the last over.

Dhoni then hit Yash Dayal for six to bring the target down to 11 from five balls. The ball could not be recovered after that humongous 110m hit. With a replacement ball, Dayal put on an excellent display of deceptive, back-of-the-hand slower balls, got Dhoni with his next delivery, and conceded a solitary run to seal the match.

During the 2023 IPL, there had been wide speculations of Dhoni retiring after the end of the season, but he assured that he would play “one more season”. Ahead of the 2024 edition, his presumed last, Dhoni stepped down as CSK captain and Ruturaj Gaikwad took over.

No post-match handshakes

On a Cricbuzz panel, anchor Saiyami Kher pointed out that after the game, Dhoni waited to shake hands with the RCB cricketers, but none of them reciprocated.

“I can see that with the RCB team,” explained Michael Vaughan. “They get huge amount of support, but they also wind a lot of people up … I get it that they have never been in a position where they won the IPL, they are desperate to make it to the eliminations [but] you don’t want to be one of those teams everyone wants to lose apart from your own team fans.”

“RCB is always high on emotion,” pointed out Kher. “Usually, we see Virat, who’s always high on emotion, but we even saw Faf really charged up today; Siraj, who’s usually charged up; Maxwell was charged up. So, clearly it’s a team that works on those high-octane emotions.”

“It doesn’t matter you win a World Cup final,” responded Harsha Bhogle. “You display your emotion. You still shake hands with the opposition. It’s one of the great things about our game because it’s symbolic of the fact that now our antagonism is over. We did not give an inch to each other, but now the antagonism is over, it was just a game, you shake hands, go back, and then celebrate again.”

Vaughan then reminded of Dhoni’s potential retirement: “If there was ever a time for a group of players to show awareness [this was one]. We don’t know if that was MSD’s last game. Those players have run around the ground doing handstands when all they needed to [was] go ‘wait a minute, the legend’s over there, we have to just go and shake his hand, and then we’re going and do a few cartwheels and handstands and flips,’ that’s absolutely fine.

“We are talking as if he’s [Dhoni] gone. We don’t know. But yeah, I wouldn’t want to be an RCB player tomorrow morning thinking ‘wait a minute, someone just announced his retirement and we didn’t have the decency to go and shake his hand first’.”