MS Dhoni, who has been reassigned as Chennai Super Kings captain, stated that the pressure of captaincy was affecting Ravindra Jadeja’s performance in IPL 2022.
Jadeja, who joined the franchise in 2012, became the third player to lead the Super Kings side after Dhoni and Suresh Raina. Dhoni gave him captainship at the start of the IPL.
However, Jadeja was unable to handle the captaincy pressure and saw a decline in his own game, so he decided to step down as captain and hand over the captaincy to MS Dhoni.
Ravindra Jadeja was seen as clueless while batting this season, getting 113 runs in 93 balls at a strike rate of 121.5, with a boundary every 8.3 balls. He was impactless in bowling too as in the nine matches he played, he only fared to take five wickets.
“I think Jadeja knew last season he’d be captaining this year. For the first two games, I oversaw his work and let him be later. After that, I insisted he’d take his own decisions and responsibility for them,” said Dhoni after the win over SRH on Sunday.
“Once you become captain, it means a lot of demands come in. But it affected his mind as the tasks grew. I think captaincy burdened his prep and performances,” he added.
CSK won two and lost six of the eight games in which Jadeja was the captain.
Dhoni also stated that he stopped giving Jadeja advice to him after a few games because he wanted the latter to understand his responsibilities and remain involved in the game with his role.
“He knew and got enough time to prepare, what is important is you want him to lead the side and I wanted that transition to happen. At the end of the season, you don’t want him to feel as the captaincy was done by someone else and I’m just going for a toss,” said the current CSK skipper.
In the first game under the leadership of Dhoni this season, Chennai Super Kings defeated Sunrisers Hyderabad by 13 runs after posting 202/2 on the board and later restricted Sunrisers Hyderabad to 189 on Sunday.
