Former Indian captain MS Dhoni has not been in the best of times in his international cricket career and has been at the receiving end of a severe amount of backlash.
Cricket news: After India’s defeat in the ODI series against England, Dhoni took the match ball from the umpires
He could not replicate his stupendous form of the IPL 2018 in the T20I and ODI series against England and failed to meet the demands of his team.
In the second ODI at Lord’s his approach to the game was severely criticised as he did not accelerate when the asking rate started to leapfrog.
Even in the last ODI at Bristol he could not show his magic with the bat and overall in the series scored runs at an abysmal strike rate of 63.20.
After the final game, Dhoni had asked the umpires to hand over the match ball to him. This act spread like wildfire as everyone began to imagine if the veteran cricketer would announce his retirement from international cricket.
The theory was strongly supported by the fact that Dhoni had collected the stumps prior to his Test retirement announcement back in 2014.
Recently the 37-year-old cricketer finally opened up in an interview on why he took the match ball with him that day.
“We actually have to keep working to know what really is happening. That was to see why we are not able to get enough reverse swing because we’ll be playing the World Cup and need to be clear about what is it that we need to do so that we get reverse swing going.
It’s something very important and if the opposition is getting it we should also get it at some point or the other so that’s why I took the ball. After 50 overs, the ball is useless to the ICC so I requested the umpire for a ball and then I gave it to the bowling coach and said we need to work on it,” Dhoni was quoted as saying by Wah Cricket.
“We discussed on how we can get it scuffed up so that we can get a bit of reverse swing going that will, in turn, help the fast bowlers get the Yorkers after the 40-over mark that would help us in restricting the opposition by not giving too many runs in the last ten overs,” the veteran cricketer added.