Dhoni finishes off in style once again!
Mahendra Singh Dhoni. Where do I even begin? He’s always had a quirky and nonchalant way of doing things his own way, doesn’t he? Hitting the stumps without even looking, swinging his bat with a wristy flick and a powerful bottom-hand or picking a fateful 19:29 IST on the nation’s 74th Independence Day to ask his country-men to consider him being ‘retired’.
A 4:07 long Instagram Live Video was all we got from the ‘Pal do Pal ka Shaayar’, no flashy announcements with a media channel, no virtual press conference, no interview, just a video encompassing moments in his career wearing the National Team Blue, ups and downs, glory and obscurity, all of it accompanied by just 15 words. Maybe that’s what has always set him apart.
Also Read: End of an era: Mahendra Singh Dhoni hangs up his gloves in International Cricket
Sure, there are his era defining numbers as well, I’ll get back to that later. The point is that good players come and go, great players are also the same to a large extent, every generation has one, but MS Dhoni is rare. He is in his own league, only he can be his own comparison. In fact, he’s not the benchmark, he’s the entire horizon.
MS Dhoni hitting the winning six in the 2011 World Cup final.
Men like Dhoni are not made from just flesh and bones, they’re carved with the chisel of years of struggle, hard-work, persistence and an unmatched determination to make it to the top, so much so, that by the end of it, the resilience gets channelled to an unfettered demeanour of a calm, cool composure that nothing could go wrong, and even if it did, it couldn’t go so wrong that it cannot become right again.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni lived and died by this philosophy and he made sure his teammates were made aware of the same. In an event with Ernst and Young, the man who masterminded the historic 2011 World Cup win, Gary Kirsten, revealed that he wouldn’t think twice before going to war with MS Dhoni by his side.
“Winning and losing doesn’t mean a lot to him, he just gets on with it. He has this uncanny presence about him without saying much. People want to follow him, people want to go with him.”
One word that comes to my mind about Dhoni’s leadership is presence. I put the words — inspiration and presence — together, because I believe, most people are in a position to inspire people through their work ethic whereas Dhoni was a leader for them through his presence.
I have read that great leaders in the world give credit to others when things are going well and take responsibility when things are going badly. MS Dhoni is that to the ‘T’.”
Also Read: MS Dhoni might be a part of CSK until 2022: Kasi Viswanathan, CSK CEO
What was it about that long-haired 23-year-old boy who got run out on a duck in his first international assignment that drew the unwavering loyalty of men and the collective imagination of the entire nation?
Is it because of his origin, a relatively unknown lad from a small town of one corner of India making it to the top of the world, was it his silence that became the glamour or was it something we’d all be grasping for to explain when even the people closest to Dhoni do not know what it is that makes someone a Dhoni.
Speaking of run-outs, sport is no exception to Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence, is it? Time’s a flat circle. Dhoni’s career started with a run-out at Chattogram and ended with one at Manchester. In between 15 years went by and a plethora of records were broken, registered, re-registered until we became tired and started seeking newer pastures in a newer face.
Let’s indulge in numbers for a while. Beyond the immaculate captain, Dhoni, the wicket-keeper batsman has left a swashbuckling and rich legacy to endure as well, quite possibly being the greatest middle order presence in the history of the game.
Also Read: MS Dhoni: An enigma who revolutionized Indian cricket
10,773 runs including 10 centuries and a jaw-dropping average of over 50 in ODIs. Only Virat Kohli has an average better than Dhoni in ODI cricket beating the likes of even the God of Cricket, Sachin Tendulkar.
47 times remaining at the crease in a successful ODI run chase. Jonty Rhodes is next on the list with 33.
9 times he’s finished a run chase with an over-boundary. No other player has done it more often.
229 sixes in ODIs. Only Rohit Sharma has more for India.
444 dismissals as a wicket-keeper in ODIs. Third most in the format. 123 stumpings. No one else has more than 100.
1617 runs at an average of 37.60 in T20I cricket. 91 wicket-keeper dismissals, including 34 stumpings- the highest for someone in that format.
With Mahi at the helm, no score was big enough to not be achieved, and no target too unrealistic to be chased down. Dhoni has built a career out of meeting situations, negotiating with the conditions and deadlines and seeing them successfully to the very end. It’s a simple game for someone whose head works as fast and sharp as his does when it comes to seeing things.
“When you take the big score and break it into small targets and you keep achieving those targets, it gives you confidence,” Dhoni had explained after a successful chase in the 2015 World Cup match against Zimbabwe in Auckland.
“Also a factor, who is bowling well, who is not and who can you target? It sounds really complicated, but more often than not when you are in those situations it’s the subconscious that is working.”
People say that as long as you stick to an ideal and trust the process, the results will follow. And follow they did. When trusted with leadership for the first time, MS Dhoni catapulted a young generation of Indian cricketers to the front page in the newest format of the sport, scripting a historic World Cup win!
And they did that in some style – a squad in complete disarray from the humiliation in West Indies, heavyweights like Dravid, Sachin and Sourav sitting out, without a coach and without a leadership. MS Dhoni was the captain of that ship as well as the anchor and the rudder!
Also Read: MS Dhoni is a pretty similar player to me, very relaxed and calm: Josh Hazlewood
It takes more than a man to hand the ball to an uncharted name in Joginder Sharma to bowl the final over of a tense encounter in the final of the first T20I World Cup final against a Misbah Ul Haq hell bent on demolition.
The now 36-year old Joginder who’s currently serving as Deputy Superintendent of Haryana Police, repaid Dhoni’s faith in him with a glorious fourth delivery that Misbah tried to scoop, but could only get as far as Sreesanth’s clutches at fine leg.
Since that day in Johannesburg, Dhoni was no longer just a man. He became a cultural icon in the country, the epicentre of a young-blood revolution in Indian cricket that wanted to take the world by storm and the historic World Cup win eventually paved the way for the epic that is now known as the Indian Premier League. And MS was once again at the heart of it too.
Dhoni has taken Chennai Super Kings, arguably the most consistent team in the history of the IPL, to eight finals in 12 editions- winning three of those.
Franchise cricket, though built on the same road map as franchise football and basketball, is a lot more chaotic in nature. Teams get reshuffled more often, cores are harder to keep hold of and the air of unpredictability always reigns supreme. But when you have a Dhoni to glue the team together with, those factors turn out to be pretty trivial.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s grandest moment, both as captain and player, however arrived in the 2011 World Cup at home, especially the final. That knock by MS became the centre-piece for his own Bollywood biopic, portrayed by the late great Sushant Singh Rajput and why wouldn’t it? It was a night that turned him into an overnight legend.
Also Read: MS Dhoni wanted me to learn from my own experiences: Hardik Pandya
The deadpan look that Dhoni had on his face after ‘finishing it off in style’ screamed of nothing but satisfaction. Those six weeks in the spring of 2011 in India was when it all came together for both Dhoni, and Indian cricket.
Dhoni got the opportunity to call the shots, pick the players he wanted thus phasing the older heavyweights out to make sure Indian cricket kept afoot with the need for pace, fitness and precision in the modern game and kept them all together under an umbrella of one-ness, of service to the nation being the foremost duty, rather than individual glory.
Even in the final, when Sachin and Sehwag got dismissed that early and the pressure was greater than the depths of Mariana until Gambhir and Kohli stepped to fill in the void, Dhoni decided to take the brunt of the expectations to see the match to its end and promoted himself ahead of Yuvraj.
And then he led. With both the bat and the call, perfecting the art of running in between wickets to slip an extra run, piling pressure on the bowlers, middling the ball and playing it down the ground, not taking risks and ending things with a gigantic spectacle. That was cricket of the highest order, that was the pinnacle and Mahi’s new India were there.
Revisiting all of this now that the great man has called time on his career, something we all were expecting but didn’t quite know when to anticipate, brings a certain sense of nostalgia, as it most inadvertently always does.
The march of time is relentless and nothing shouts good old days passing by more than our favourite idols, the men who are larger than life calling an end to their careers that once captivated us out of the blue.
With MS now beginning his second innings away from the blue of India that he wore so proudly, Ganguly’s lions, the men of EA Cricket 07 are now all but a distant memory.
It’s the end, well almost. There’s another couple of IPLs on the horizon in the next six months. Dhoni will definitely be wearing the yellow, and despite all our different allegiances, we might as well tip the hat to the man, the myth, the legend and cherish his cricket before he’s gone forever.
Thank you, Dhoni.