Ravindra Jadeja on April 30 decided to relinquish his captaincy post with CSK and hand over the reigns back to the great MS Dhoni for the remainder of the ongoing Indian Premier League season.
The call from the premier allrounder took fans by surprise, but the Chennai franchise says the move and Dhoni’s acceptance to change has been made in “larger interest” of the side.
“Ravindra Jadeja has decided to relinquish captaincy to focus and concentrate more on his game & has requested MS Dhoni to lead CSK. MS Dhoni has accepted to lead CSK in the larger interest & to allow Jadeja to focus on his game.”
the franchise said on their official Twitter handle.
Dhoni had resigned from his post as CSK skipper ahead of the 2022 campaign with an intention to allow the franchise to groom a new skipper for life after the 40-year-old. The Super Kings announced Jadeja as captain two days before their opening game against the Kolkata Knight Riders on March 26.
But just over a month later, the franchise has seen a u-turn on Jadeja’s part, as he strives to put single-minded focus on uplifting his individual performances with CSK’s playoff hopes hanging by a thin rope.
The defending champions are languishing at ninth position in the ten-team IPL 2022 standings with just two victories from their eight games in a campaign where they have played a largely ineffective and unconvincing brand of cricket in either department.
Jadeja’s short stint as CSK skipper lasted just eight games after accepting that he isn’t able to manage the captaincy duties along with his responsibilities as a spin-bowling allrounder, who does the critical power-hitting job down the order and bowls through the middle-overs phase.
The Indian cricketer has made only 112 runs from his eight matches with a best score of 26, averaging just 22.40 while carrying a pedestrian strike-rate of 121.73. He has also gone for an expensive 8.19 rpo.
Having said that, Dhoni agreeing to be part of another captaincy shuffle comes as a surprise, partly because the man is known for not wanting last-minute changes in the team and partly down to him understandably being on his last leg as a CSK player.
