Chennai Super Kings (CSK), on Thursday, were officially eliminated from the race for playoffs in the ongoing Indian Premier League (IPL) 2022 after Mumbai Indians (MI) secured a comfortable five-wicket victory in the contest.
The Rohit Sharma-led Mumbai bundled out the Super Kings on a mere 97 before chasing down the target with five wickets in hand. However, a controversy erupted during the opening overs of the game when the Decision Review System (DRS) remained unavailable due to power issues, which cost CSK the wicket of opener Devon Conway.
The left-handed batter had to leave the field after being adjudged LBW out. The replay showed that the ball might have missed the leg-stump, but Conway couldn’t go for the television referral due to a power failure.
After the match, CSK head coach Stephen Fleming expressed dissatisfaction over the unavailability of the DRS, stating they were a bit unlucky and disappointed over the developments.
“It was a little bit unlucky that it happened at that time. Yeah, we are a bit disappointed, but that’s still part of the game, isn’t it? But yeah, [that] sort of set off a chain of events that were not in our favour. But we should be better than that, it certainly wasn’t a great start,” said Fleming in a post-match presser.
Despite facing a defeat against arch-rivals Mumbai and getting eliminated from the fifteenth season, Fleming was optimistic about learning a lot in the upcoming fixtures.
“We’re still learning about our squad, as most teams are, and hopefully, we can learn a lot over the next couple of games and go forward. What I can say is that there’s not much margin between having a great season and a not-so-great season. So we’ve been through enough of these seasons to know that. So we’re not going too much over, but we do need to improve in some areas.”
“We’ve got positives throughout, we are not far away. But when you’ve got a couple of holes, they always seem to pop at the wrong time. So we haven’t been as good as we need to be, we know that. But we are trying to find some positive pieces as we move forward. So now that we’re out of the competition, we’ve got an opportunity with two games to give some other guys an opportunity and hopefully find something there as well,” Fleming added.
