Forget Rajkot, says Dhoni

It was difficult for the bowlers, agrees skipper

“Yes, I agree it was a difficult task from the bowlers’ point of view. (But) Normally you don’t get wickets like that every time. The ground (in Rajkot) itself was small, the boundary was about 60 or 65 yards and the wicket was so nice that it was very easy to clear the field,” Dhoni said here on Thursday.

The skipper then went on to ask his bowlers to forget what happened in Rajkot. “It’s very important not to think of that (match). You may go for four boundaries in a row, but what really matters is the last two deliveries because every single run counts. You may have scored 400 odd runs, but saving that single is very important. You need to have a plan in your mind to save that single because, if you see, even after scoring 400 odd runs we won the game by just three runs,” he noted.

The right-hander defended the curators, who, according to him, were doing a thankless job. “There is no fixed formula to prepare a wicket. At times you try to make a good wicket and it turns out to be a flat wicket,” he remarked. Dhoni attributed Sri Lanka’s spirited chase of India’s highest ODI total partly to the advent of T20 cricket. “A lot depends on the start. If you score anything over 300 and get two or three early wickets, then you can afford to relax. But because of T20 and the kind of wickets you get sometimes, I don’t think anything is a safe score,” he remarked.

But India managed to pull off the thriller thanks to some tight bowling at the death by Zaheer Khan and Ashish Nehra. “I think that was one of the best (bowling performances) in the past one year because I have always said that we have not been consistent in bowling. But if you see the last game, in the last five overs we gave around 27 runs and I think that was a very good effort.”