Familiar soundtrack to this Rishabh Pant special

"Chennai Super Kings apne IPL ke saare matches home ground pe hi khelti hai."

Khaleel Ahmed said it best. That CSK effectively play all their matches at home, such is the support for them everywhere they go.

It was no different in Visakhapatnam on Sunday, when the crowd that was supposed to be behind Delhi Capitals at their "home" venue was dyed in yellow. Chants of "Dhoni! Dhoni!" rang through the stadium every now and then, and sometimes even when MS Dhoni, the main man behind CSK's cult-like pan-India following, was nowhere in sight.

Those chants, as endearing as they were, must have been familiar decibels for Rishabh Pant. For, he has spent a significant part of his short career listening to them.

Be it at his homeground in Delhi in 2019, when he messed up DRS reviews, or in Rajkot, when he botched up Litton Das's stumping, familiar chants of "Dhoni! Dhoni!" had broken in the stands and reminded Pant of the enormity of the shoe size he set out to fill. They didn't stop in Thiruvananthapuram when he dropped Evin Lewis and were perhaps the loudest in Mohali, when he fluffed up not one but two stumping chances.

"I missed a stumping in Mohali and the crowd started to chant 'Dhoni Dhoni'," Pant recently reminisced while speaking to Star Sports about his comeback from the car crash. "I used to really feel very bad. I used to go back to my room and cry at 20-21 years of age. Under stress, I couldn't breathe. So much pressure and I didn't know what to do."

It was so bad at the time that Rohit Sharma wanted fans to "keep their eyes away" from Pant while Virat Kohli wanted him to be "left alone" and not be "disrespected" with chants and boos.

So five years on, when Pant turned up for the toss in Visakhapatnam as captain of the Delhi Capitals, he knew the gigantic task at hand. He spoke to Ian Bishop about putting on a really good performance to "turn the crowd around" and fortunately did come up with one himself, batting his way to a welcome half-century that was scored to the soundtrack of Dhoni chants.

That Pant did what he did while walking in at No.3 made it even more special but in no way was it an easy initiation to the batting position. He was 23 off 23 deliveries at one point, struggling to time the ball as well as the world is used to seeing him do. At the time, he only had three overs left in the innings to catch up and needed to do so against the likes of fail-safe Mustafizur Rahman and the promising Matheesha Pathirana, the latter having just bowled two 150 kph yorkers that were too good even for Mitchell Marsh and Tristan Stubbs.

But Pant made the challenge look so simple, sometimes without even using both his hands. Like the six he hit against Mustafizur's slower delivery, a ball which cut back in sharply and had Pant falling over to the off-side while meeting it. But the feet stayed put, the hips pivoted, the hands swung as one came off the bat handle and the other carried through with the shot. And a shot it was.

"I took my time initially because I haven't played much cricket in the last one and a half years, so I thought I've to give myself enough time," Pant said after the game, "but at the same time I kept believing that I could change the match.

"I love to be on the field and this is something I have depended my life on... [but] 1.5 years was [a long wait]. But you gotta keep doing what you can as a cricketer and keep learning from it. I had a self belief that whatever happens, I need to come back on the ground. Apart from that thought process, I didn't think much. "

While it was delightful to see the wicketkeeper-batter pinch 13 runs off the six balls that Mustafizur bowled to him, it was his battle with the fast and slingy Matheesha Pathirana that made people sit back and notice.

It was a fantastic 19th over from Pathirana but wasn't his best on the day by any stretch of imagination. In trying an encore of the yorkers earlier in his spell, he pitched them an inch too short or too full, and all Pant needed was that smallest of errors in length to take DC from a par total to a very good total.

6, 4, 4, W is how that over from Pathirana read. The fast near-yorkers were pumped for sixes, in hindsight roughly proving to be the difference between the sides.

"It was excellent batting," CSK coach Stephen Fleming said of that phase in play. "Pathirana had come off an excellent over in the over before, so quite rightly so he was lining up the wickets. Not many in the world who can do what Rishabh Pant did.

"Pathirana has had a lot of success and it was a good contest. It showed that Pant has still got a lot of natural flair and that he played really well. If we were able to restrict them to 170 something, we'd have walked off pretty happy but the extra 12-15 runs were quite crucial in the end."

In many ways, it was quietly poetic that Pant batted DC to their first points of the season while being up against not one but two showstoppers. Because once Pathirana was done with uprooting his fair share of stumps on the night, Dhoni turned the clocks back with vintage shots, including an encore of his six over extra cover from the Vizag epic. It might not have been enough to win CSK the game but it got the partisan crowd going.

Dhoni wrapped up the innings with a flurry of big hits as the chants of his name grew louder at the venue. Once again, Pant was in the middle while "Dhoni! Dhoni!" did the rounds. But somewhere deep down, they must have been deeply comforting for the 26-year-old, someone who's had to build a career to that background score and someone who's now starting to write his own scripts to that tune all over again.