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There is no place to hide for skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his beleaguered Chennai Super Kings who crashed to their fifth defeat and fourth in a row, when they went down to Rajasthan Royals by 17 runs at the Sardar Patel Stadium in Motera, last night.
Dhoni is the sort of man who is comfortable when the team combination settles early in a tournament or a series and is averse to change it. He admitted as much after the defeat.
"We made several changes in the team, but nothing is working for us. We are ending up doing more and more changes. We need to settle with one squad. From now onwards, every game is important," he said.
He was obviously referring to the changes in the bowling combination and that has turned out to be playing the Russian roulette, not knowing which bowler would let the team down with one bad over. To top it, the batting, considered to be their strength, has not been firing consistently.
At half-way stage in their campaign, the Super Kings, with just two wins from seven outings, are lying seventh in the standings, just one rung above Kings XI Punjab. Of the remaining seven games, five are at home in Chepauk, besides trips to Nagpur and Dharmasala.
For a team that was a finalist in 2008 and semi-finalist in 2009, these are hard days with the task of making it to the top four, much less winning the tournament, getting increasingly difficult.
Even Dhoni seems to be rather baffled that a team full of talent is unable to get its act together. "There is no single reason for our team's defeat as both batting and bowling departments failed to click," he said after the loss to Rajasthan Royals.
He could well extend this reasoning to other games, barring the ones in Kolkata and Delhi where fleetingly the various pieces in the puzzle fell in place to make a pretty picture. However, the Super Kings canvas otherwise has been full of random brush strokes, some bright, some dull, but like modern art, understandable to only a few, if at all any.
Dhoni rather wistfully said the team was awaiting the arrival of two top Aussie guns, Mike Hussey and Doug
Bollinger, the fast bowler who is in prime form at the moment, soon after the conclusion of the ongoing Test
series in New Zealand.
The two top signings will be available only later this week at the earliest, after Wednesday's home game against Royal Challengers Bangalore. Another loss would certainly put an end to the Super Kings' campaign in IPL-3 and they would then be better off planning for next season by way of rebuilding the team.
Interestingly, Dhoni finds himself in similar position that Shane Warne was in during the 2008 season when the Royals were written off after a disastrous start. But it brought out the best in Warne who blossomed forth as a true leader of men, motivating his team to win the Cup.
Likewise, the onus is now on Dhoni to lead the way from darkness into sunshine and reinvent himself as a captain par excellence that he undoubtedly is.
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