Bengaluru: Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni has praised his side’s ability to ‘manage chaos’ under intense pressure after clinching a nerve-wracking one-run win over Bangladesh in their penultimate league game of the World Twenty20 in Bengaluru.
Bangladesh were on course to pull off their first ever T20 win over India, needing only two runs off the last three bowls at M Chinnaswamy Stadium on Wednesday.
However, in a miraculous turnaround, India kept their semifinals hopes alive after dismissing three Bangladeshi batsmen in the last three deliveries off all-rounder Hardik Pandya’s over.
Bangladesh saw themselves crash out of the T20 format’s pinnacle event after falling agonizingly short of one run following Dhoni’s incredible work with one glove to run out Mustafizur Rahman in the last ball of the game.
“In a situation like this, it’s literally chaos. What you are trying to do is you’re trying to manage chaos,” Dhoni told reporters while addressing a post-match press conference. “Everybody will come and he’ll have his own opinion. Often the opinion of a batsman is very different to the opinion of a bowler. But what you have to do is you have to see what the strength of the batsman is who is batting at that point of time, how the wicket is behaving, whether there is some kind of reverse swing or no reverse swing on offer. All these things you need to calculate and I feel what really helps is you listen to all of them.
“But at the end of the day you push the bowler to bowl what you feel is good at that point of time. If I am convinced that this is something I want to do, I will go ahead with it but definitely having an open mind at that point of time really helps because at times in situations like these under pressure, that’s where the input of others comes in. But you have to assess everything and it has to happen in a very short span of time.”
India will next play against Australia in their fourth group game in Mohali on Sunday in a bid to secure their spot in the semifinals. (ANI)