The plan at CSK camp was for the former captain to mother-hen his replacement, giving him time to grow into the role. Jadeja has shown admiration for Dhoni. And has not shied away from relying heavily on the former skipper for on-field judgments. However, the allrounder’s performance this year — 112 runs and five wickets in eight matches – encouraged him to reconsider.
IPL 2022: Spoon feeding doesn’t really help captain, MS Dhoni on taking over captaincy
“Right from the outset, between myself and Jadeja, he understood last season that he would be given the opportunity to lead this year.” He was aware and had plenty time to prepare; what is crucial is that you want him to lead the side, and I wanted that transition to occur.”
“In the first two games, there was information flowing towards Jaddu. But after that, I left it up to him to select which perspective. Because you don’t want him to feel as if the captaincy was done by someone else and I’m simply going for a coin flip at the end of five games or the end of the season.
“So it was a gradual transition where I said, okay, this is what I’ll do, I’ll take care of fielding angles and everything for the first two games.” “After that, if it comes to me, no, you have to decide on your own because that’s the only way you’ll understand what captaincy is,” he stated.
Dhoni anticipated Jadeja will regain form after being relieved of leadership.
“Even if you alleviate captaincy and are at your best, which is what we want. We were also losing a superb fielder, and we are still looking for a deep mid-wicket fielder, but we have dropped 17-18 catches, which is cause for concern.” “These are challenging games, and hopefully we will come back strong,” he added. “It’s vital to speak with the bowlers.”
Dhoni stated that they were able to post a defendable score on the board during the match.
“To begin with, it was a good score. I didn’t do anything different because there hasn’t been much of a difference with the captain. The objective we were given was a good one; dew was expected, so the bowling had to be good.