Dubai: CSK have won the match by 9 wickets against KXIP. Ruturaj Gaikwad’s unbeaten 62 of 49 balls helped CSK to beat KXIP by nine wickets with 7 balls to spare. It meant Punjab out of playoff race.A happy Dhoni, said, ‘ It was a difficult campaign for us. I don’t think we played to the full potential. We did commit a lot of errors at different points in the tournament. The last four games, it could be a template as to where we would have liked ourselves to be. If you are lagging behind too much, it becomes very difficult to push yourself and come out with performances. That’s where each and everyone had to contribute. Very proud the way they played their cricket. It would have been very tough 6-7 games. You won’t want to be in a dressing room that is not really enjoying cricket. You want to keep coming up with new formulas and new theories, but if the dressing room atmosphere is not happy, it becomes very tough. A lot depends on what the BCCI decides on the auction. We need to slightly change our core group and look for the next ten years. At the start of the IPL, we made a team and it served well for us. There comes a time where you have to shift a bit, change a bit and hand it over to the next generation. That’s what will be the policy, try to form a strong core group. (Message to the fans) We’ll come back strong, that’s what we are known for. This has been a tough year. This is one of the seasons where most of the teams played well. Or you can say one team played brilliantly which is Mumbai Indians and the rest all have played badly to be in the big cluster. So, it depends on how you want to look at it. There’s definitely a lot of positives. (Many players receiving his jersey) Maybe they thought I am retiring. Whenever we have seen him (Ruturaj Gaikwad) bat, he’s somebody somebody who has batted well. We were not able to see a lot of him in the games. Right at the start of the season, it was a very tough period where he got COVID and was out. Even after 20 days, he wasn’t fit. He didn’t get a lot of practice where we would have loved to see him bat. Even if he’d got 15-20 runs in his first game, it gives you a glimpse. That was one of the main reasons we kept going with Faf and Watson. It didn’t work but I don’t think it was bad. That’s the point where you say I’ll go with the experienced guys and try to come back into tournament. It’s (IPL 2021) only a few months from now, that’s a good thing and hopefully no lockdown so you can put in a lot of pressure on the skill aspect. A lot can be planned provided there’s no lockdown.’
On his part, sad KL Rahul, Punjab skipper, said, ‘ It is as simple as that. We didn’t bat really well. Big pressure game and we expected 180-190 on the board, unfortunately we couldn’t soak in the pressure and get a big total. Disappointed but that’s how IPL goes. We didn’t have results going our way in the first half. The team still felt we were playing good cricket. We were patchy at times with the bowling and the batting didn’t come together in the first half, we started doing well in the second half and really proud that we gave ourselves an opportunity to come into the top four.’