Chappell was talking about how he groomed Dhoni from a mad dasher to a brilliant finisher.
Greg Chappell, in a recent interaction with Playwrite Foundation’s FB page, detailed the role he played in MS Dhoni’s transformation from a brutal hitter to a calculative finisher. Chappell recalled a match against Sri Lanka in 2005 and said he had challenged Dhoni to hit along the ground.
Chappell said he always challenged Dhoni to 'finish games' for India and the latter would have a huge smile on his face whenever he got the team past the finish line.
“Never seen a powerful batsman like MS Dhoni,” Greg Chappell admits
“I remember his knock of 183 against Sri Lanka and how he tore them apart. It was power hitting at its very best. The next match was in Pune. I asked MS, 'why don't you play along the ground more instead of trying to hit every ball to the boundary'. We were chasing 260 odd and were in a good position and Dhoni was playing a contrasting innings to the one he had played just a couple of days before,” Chappell recalled.
"I always used to challenge him if he could finish the game. There used to be a booming smile on his face, whenever he used to score the winning runs. He is definitely the best finisher the game has ever seen," he signed off.
However, this didn’t go down well with Harbhajan, who took a shot at Chappell and tweeted,"He asked Dhoni to play along the ground coz coach was hitting everyone out the park.. He was playing different games #worstdaysofindiancricketundergreg (sic)."
Chappell’s two-year tenure from 2005-2007 was filled with controversies and tiffs with senior players like Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, who was dropped from the team and stripped of the captaincy.
"Hiring him was the biggest mistake of my career. I had known a different person from a stint as my batting coach in Australia. I don't know what led to our relationship breaking down. After the 2007 World Cup, I haven't interacted with him," Ganguly had told Hindustan Times in 2018.