JOIN US M S Dhoni completed 100 ODI wins as captain, took a brilliant catch and emulated the legendary Kapil Dev as the only other Indian skipper to have led the team into two World Cup semifinals after his resurgent team crushed Bangladesh by 109 runs in the quarterfinals on Thursday.
While Dhoni was the man of the moment, he chose to talk about the man of the match Rohit Sharma and Suresh Raina whose innings helped India script the win. Excerpts:
On Rohit and Raina’s innings: I felt Rohit and Raina batted well. Rohit, the reason being the wickets kept falling on the other side, and still, he kept himself very calm. His strike rate dropped, but still, he knew if he's there and he plays maximum number of overs, he can definitely score and score at a good pace.
Raina, we all know he's a natural stroke maker. More often than not what we have seen is he goes in and he strikes quite early, so it's always good to have somebody like him batting at No 5. But overall, I think, how they took the game forward was very crucial because one more wicket at that point of time and you could have ended up maybe 50 runs less.
On whether any concerns were there in the change room after 115/3 in 28 overs: At that point of time, I personally thought let's look for 260 runs, and depending on how we go, maybe next five overs, six overs, seven overs, I will keep revising the target. As we got closer to the 260 mark, we still had overs in hand.
I said, okay, from 260 let's raise it to 270-275, then we had another good over, we said, okay, add another 10 runs to it. We kept doing that and ended up with 300 runs, which I felt was a good score. But at the same time it needed us to bowl good areas, to get wickets with the new ball and all of that stuff. I don't think it was like a par plus score. I think it was a close to par score, but certainly if the opposition had batted well they could have got those runs.
On his confidence level as captain after seven wins in a row: I think what's important for us is we have scored runs in all the games, whether we have batted first or chased, and still, we don't have our batsmen in the top five run scorers’ list for the World Cup, which means everybody has chipped in, everybody has contributed, which is a good position to be in, especially in the knockout stages.
We'll have to keep repeating what we have been doing; as simple as that. You win a game, whatever you have done right, you have to keep repeating. Maybe the individuals who get the number of wickets, they will change. The batsmen who score runs, the names will change, but still, we are scoring runs and we are taking wickets. That will be good for us.