Further two matches will be played in the Indian Premier League on Thursday, with Chennai Super Kings slated to take on Pune Warriors in the evening. The two sides came head to head earlier in the tournament with Pune Warriors emerging as victors.
The defending champions, Chennai Super Kings, currently have two wins from five matches after oscillating between victory and defeat. Lying in the bottom half of the table, they would eagerly look to scoring points on Thursday. In their last match, against the same opposition, they were outdone in the final over losing by seven wickets.
While Faf du Plessis and Ravindra Jadeja scored 40+ runs each, captain MS Dhoni’s captaincy drew a lot of criticism from all corners. His decision to bat up the order with Suresh Raina proved costly as the pair struggled to score freely, leaving Albie Morkel and Dwayne Bravo with just one over to face.
Defending 155 was going to be difficult, but Dhoni’s decision to hand over the ball to Yo Mahesh for the final over proved baffling as Bravo has far more experience of bowling at the death. To bring their campaign back on track, Dhoni will have to fix these issues at the earliest.
The Pune Warriors have six points from five matches after their defeat to Royal Challengers Bangalore on Tuesday. A grand total could not be defended that would certainly irk the captain Sourav Ganguly.
His persistence with Ashish Nehra proved costly as Nehra conceded 54 runs off his quota while [[Marlon Samuels]’ two overs had given away just five runs. Robin Uthappa did well with the bat earlier while Jesse Ryder and Samuels have also shown aggressive intent with reasonable success so far.
Chennai will be the hosts for the match starting at 8.00pm local, half an hour after the scheduled toss at 7.30pm.