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Will Controversial end to Dhoni’s career???

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Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s

That Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s time as India’s Test captain had gone well past its best-by date to the point of becoming a case for the law of diminishing returns was a foregone conclusion. Having said that, that the career of the largely ‘no-fuss’ skipper would end in such controversial fashion was unfathomable. What was even more inconceivable was that Dhoni himself had inadvertently stirred up controversy in the manner in which he bowed out of Test cricket. Mahendra Singh Dhoni could not have chosen a more controversial finish to his Test career. Fewer questions would have been asked had Dhoni simply chosen to stay on for one more Test as tour captain, if not as the fourth Test captain, to announce his retirement at the conclusion of the Sydney Test. The Indian skipper got the decision right but got it badly wrong on the timing. After all, on the cusp of 5,000 Test runs and 100 Test cricket appearances, few would have opted to miss out on the milestones notwithstanding tired legs or aging minds. Yet at a time when the captain should have been hailed for selflessly ceding power in the face of a worthy successor claiming his legitimate right to the throne, Dhoni cast serious doubt about what really led to his rather mistimed renunciation from cricket’s oldest and most traditional format. With Dhoni nursing an injured thumb and his presence indispensable for India’s forthcoming World Cup prospects down under, fortuitous circumstances facilitated Virat Kohli’s elevation to the post of India’s Test captain, albeit for the one Test, the first of the four Test match series against formidable Australia. Dhoni did return to captain the team in the next two Tests. But India’s almost meek surrender in the second innings of the second Test in Brisbane before the skipper alluded to ‘unrest’ in the dressing room at the post match press conference followed by his rather mystifying retirement altogether from Test cricket at the end of the third Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground after the Australians took a firm hold of the Border Gavaskar Trophy gave plenty of food for thought and speculation at a time when perhaps much of the charade could have just as easily been avoided had Dhoni held out until the end of the fourth Test and the end of the series or had chosen to call time on his career as skipper and made the decision before the commencement of the tour, clearing the decks for fresh captain and action. While Dhoni chose the BCCI route to announce his Test retirement in a bid to avoid media and public frenzy, his decision coupled with the timing only fuelled further conjecture. At the end of the Melbourne Test, the BCCI issued a statement to the effect, “One of India's greatest Test captains under whose leadership India became the No. 1 team in the Test rankings, M.S. Dhoni, has decided to retire from Test cricket citing the strain of playing all formats of cricket. BCCI, while respecting the decision of M.S. Dhoni to retire from Test cricket, wishes to thank him for his enormous contribution to Test cricket and the laurels that he has brought to India. Virat Kohli will be the captain of the Indian team for the fourth and final Test against Australia to be played in Sydney." In true Dhoni fashion – always providing a teaser/trailer and little else, he then sat back and let the speculation run riot. Yet one could not see past the rarity of the development of such significance where an international cricket captain has relinquished his position and place in the team in the midst of a tour, under duress or otherwise. The very fact that Sanjay Patel, the BCCI secretary, alluded that Dhoni had previously discussed the matter of his retirement and that the decision was not one made in haste, not to mention the fact that the BCCI took the onus upon itself to make the decision public, suggests that the BCCI and Dhoni could have put more thought into handling the situation better than having the ignominy of Australia claiming to have contributed to the demise of yet another opposition captain in the middle of a tour. Claiming such a prized scalp is well within any opposing team’s bragging rights. After all, apart from Dhoni’s stature as India’s most successful cricket captain, by statistical standards, Dhoni should have bowed out of the Test arena on a swansong as India’s leading wicketkeeper batsman.

Not a man given to pomp and garish ostentation, Dhoni may not have had his own success highlighted in gold even at the time of his retirement had he not courted controversy in such inadvertent fashion. (Not that he has ever given off the impression that he cares too much whether his contribution translates into pomp and pageantry.) At the time of his elevation to India’s national team in 2005, Dhoni seemed unsuited at the outset for the virtues of Test cricket. His wicket keeping was not something to scream from the rooftops about. His presence in the limited overs format revolved largely around his explosive, unconventional batting style that seemed to need little by way of time in the middle. Yet in no time, Dhoni found himself becoming integral to India’s Test efforts and by the time Anil Kumble decided to hang up his boots after the Delhi Test against Australia in October 2008, Dhoni seemed the inevitable choice, having already had his brush with India’s Test captaincy during the home series against the visiting South African team in April earlier that year and shouldering the responsibility of captaincy in limited overs cricket only a year before. Admittedly Dhoni had inherited a team built largely on bullish thinking and self-belief instilled by another Indian captain who did not have many backers at the time of his appointment either. However, the goals for India envisioned by Sourav Ganguly seemed realized under a captain who played the catalyst role to perfection, a fact acknowledged by the living legends of Indian cricket and former captains including Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid who played under Dhoni during their sunset years. India began to scale heights across both, one day international cricket and Test cricket, and by 2009, Dhoni held the Test championship mace proudly in his hands as India ruled the roost for almost two years till mid-2011. As India’s most successful Test captain, Dhoni holds the enviable record of having captained India in sixty of the ninety Test matches that he has played, winning a record twenty-seven Tests to Ganguly’s twenty-one. One has to remember that Dhoni’s record of sixty Test matches as captain goes three times over what any other wicketkeeper-captain has tasted at the international level. Individually, Dhoni breached notions about his wicket keeping abilities, finishing as the game’s fifth ranked wicket keeper with 294 Test dismissals and leaving far into the distance India’s wicket-keeping standards set by Syed Kirmani with 198 dismissals from eighty-eight Test appearances. With thirty-eight stumpings, he is tied with Kirmani for third place in the overall world Test records. Dhoni’s batting boasts of 4,876 Test runs at an average of thirty-eight coming in to bat as low as number six or seven in India’s batting line up. Dhoni scored 3,545 of those runs as India’s Test captain, surpassing Sunil Gavaskar’s 3,449 from forty-seven Tests to round out to a nice average of forty as captain. His only Test hundred outside of India came early in his Test career on the back on a mammoth double century partnership with Irfan Pathan in Faisalabad in 2006 when he scored his maiden Test century. That his batting was still India’s saving grace was evident in 2013 when he scored a double century (224 runs to be precise, batting at no.6) against Australia in Chennai when he went past Budhi Kunderan’s record of 192 runs as the most runs in an innings by an Indian wicketkeeper-batsman in 1964 and then again at Old Trafford in 2014 when he scored 71 runs in the midst of a rather dour situation for the Indian cricket team. His wicket keeping was still par for the course, as he effected a record for Indian wicket keeping with nine dismissals (eight catches and a stumping) in his last Test in Melbourne. While Dhoni has the legitimate excuse citing strain of playing and leading across all three formats of the sport at the international level, one would have to seriously wonder and question if Dhoni was not aware of the fact prior to embarking on the tour of Australia and actually needed the ground report before making what was a personal decision ruffle the team dynamics in a situation of flux where players shifted between two distinct authoritative figures with diverse perspectives and captaincy patterns in the dressing room in the space of four Tests and that too overseas. Why a captain who showed such patience in the face of mounting criticism over the years could not hold on for one more Test perplexed the nation as a whole. But then Dhoni’s captaincy in the sphere of Test cricket had begun to raise more than a couple of uncomfortable questions over the past three years and this then was one final conundrum as far as he was concerned. That Dhoni’s aura as an instinctive, non conventional skipper had dwindled into a shadow of his former self in Test cricket was evident as far as back as late 2011. Such were the alarming signs that they threatened to obliterate the fact that this was the same skipper who took his team to the peak of the rankings since taking over as the Test captain in 2008. Dhoni, alongside former South African cricketer and coach, Gary Kirsten, had taken the Indian Test cricket team from the middling places in the ICC Test rankings to the very pinnacle in 2009 to remain there for almost eighteen months until the start of what was India’s second successful ICC Cricket World Cup campaign in twenty-eight years. But then the downhill set in soon thereafter. India’s slippery ride saw India lose consecutive Test series abroad to England and Australia by identical 4-0 whitewashes. What was even more disturbing thought was that despite the obvious crutch of injury and retirement concerns to some of the senior most members of India’s squad, Dhoni showed little by way of initiative or even ire to fire up the team to stay competitive, signaling he was resigned to India’s fate, making the picture bleaker than it seemed possible. Expectations were high. After all, this was the skipper who took the world by storm on his first appointment as captain in the inaugural edition of the ICC World Twenty20 in 2007 leading a team of young novices.

When presented with the opportunity to virtually build his Test team from scratch, Dhoni’s inexplicable diffidence was read for indifference, a quality more dangerous than most for a skipper. For a player considered neither tactically nor technically built for the five day game, Dhoni showed plenty of gumption and enterprise to prove his detractors wrong as the numbers would suggest. One could not take away from Dhoni the status of India’s most successful Test captain – his home Tests wins at twenty-one putting him fourth behind South Africa’s Graeme Smith and Australia’s Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh in the all time great captains list. But what the statistics did not highlight at first glance was the fact that his overseas record was abysmal. Apart from India winning just six Tests abroad during his tenure, his fifteen overseas losses as captain come second only to Stephen Fleming’s sixteen from forty-two Tests for New Zealand and Brian Lara’s sixteen from twenty Tests as skipper. Even worse, India’s performance in the sphere of Test cricket post the successful 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup unraveled Dhoni’s captaincy as bereft of imagination and ideas with India losing thirteen of the twenty-two Tests played and winning just two. Few things are worse than watching a team limping to compete, the skipper carrying the cross of burden. But fewer still can match the wretched punishment of having to sit through the façade of what amounts to arduous foreign Test tours with the skipper loaded with premeditated excuses and the board only too happy to indulge him. Dhoni’s unresponsive demeanour, his non-expressionless face, his casual dismissal in the public eye of deeply affecting losses, his dubiously defensive tactics uncharacteristic of him and his heavy leaden feet and his deafening silence on the field when perhaps an encouraging word of advice was called for exasperated fans who desperately sought a semblance of a fight in the face of one too many abject defeats. For a captain who had earned applause from the senior members of the squad for leading the team by example and providing a calm, uncomplicated atmosphere in the dressing room, Dhoni’s flaws, whether as a result of disillusionment or waning interests, could no longer be ignored. There were moments in Test cricket in the three year period where even when opportunities presented themselves, Dhoni chose to play the waiting game instead of taking control of the game and let the opportunity and the opposition slip away. His overly defensive tactics, attributable to perceived or real shortcomings within himself or his team, allowed one too many matches to drift. It was with sad reflection then that one had to even suggest that his grip on India’s Test cricket team had begun to turn into a noose, strangling what were India’s Test cricket prospects. One tame surrender after another, the writing on the wall should have been etched in indelible ink after India landed England their first Test series win on Indian soil in two and a half decades when England beat India 2-1 in the 2012-’13 series. It was perhaps the first time when Dhoni came faceto- face with reality with his slowly dwindling popularity as Test cricket captain when it become apparent that at a time when the skipper’s head was almost certain to roll, instead that of a selector’s (and a popular yesteryear World Cup winner’s at that) was chosen for even suggesting that a change of guard was in order. Dhoni’s proximity to the powerful BCCI head honcho, N. Srinivasan, it was widely speculated, had saved his head but not his standing in the public eye. If it hurt Dhoni, he never showed it. Throughout his career, Dhoni has rarely let on more than he intended to. Undoubtedly that is what he was aiming for in remaining obdurately silent on his announcement. However, in this scenario he perhaps let on more than he intended to precisely through that refrain. Given the present administrative climate, it seemed certain that the Test crown would remain his irrespective of the outcome of the series, barring any unforeseeable event. The options to continue to cop flak and allow one’s aura to be diluted while reining at the top figuratively speaking or to accept a somewhat demoted slot under a keener, more ambitious, younger man were perhaps what tilted the scales for him to arrive at such a drastic decision. In a sense, that Dhoni the skipper had served his time was widely surmised. That Dhoni the wicketkeeper- batsman still had a few miles left in him, provided he was sufficiently motivated to play the five day game, remained the most baffling part of his announcement. But perhaps the conjecture had answered itself. Unfazed by criticism and the demands and calls for his head since late 2011, even the outgoing skipper could no longer deny that the wind had changed direction in the Indian dressing room. Perhaps the outcome of the series had become an all too familiar scenario for Dhoni, the excuses done to death. He finally saw his face in the mirror of the Indian captain and saw a younger reflection staring back. This time, instead of an aged countenance burdened by the scale of unrealistic expectations or soured by the paucity of resources at hand, the skipper found someone willing to take on the mantle and truly make his own, challenges et al. Dhoni’s retirement brings the curtains down on what called be a golden period or purple patch in India’s cricket history. Although it was essentially a derivative - the worthy continuation of taking one skipper’s (Ganguly’s) aspirations to fruition, Dhoni represented the fulcrum for phenomenal possibilities in the cricket arena. Somewhere down the line, that image took a hit and with it, India’s fortunes in Test cricket plummeted to the point of obscurity where the captain’s flawed tactics were as much on glaring display as India’s obvious shortcomings. That said, one cannot deny Dhoni’s place in India’s Test cricket history. What could have been avoided was his controversial signing off

Unknown

Some say he’s half man half fish, others say he’s more of a seventy/thirty split. Either way he’s a fishy bastard.

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