The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  ‘I thought after playing for India he’ll change . . . I thought after 2007 World T20, he’ll change . . . I thought after marriage he’ll change . . . ab toh badlega (now he’ll change) . . . ab toh badlega . . . But no, nothing. So by the time the 2011 World Cup win came, I knew yeh kabhi nahi badlega (he’ll never change) . . .’ Chittu says with almost a sense of resignation. The more things changed, the more Dhoni stayed the same.

  On the cricket field, at least from around 2007 to 2015, Dhoni seemed to be at the forefront of evolution. It was like he was always faster on the uptake—in terms of limited overs cricket anyway—of where the cricket world was headed.

  The only facet of him that has changed comes as a major surprise to me and it has to do with his cricket. In his extensive career as ODI cricket’s nerveless finisher, he has thrived on taking run chases into the last over and setting up what I have often referred to in my match reports as Dhoni Time—basically, cricket’s own Mexican standoff scenario where the bowler and he are in a duel with their hands on their respective triggers. Till, say, a couple of years ago, you could almost bank on Dhoni firing the fatal blow and hitting bullseye like he does with weapon in hand. But it’s not been the same ever since Kagiso Rabada bowled that sensational last over in Kanpur when the young South African pacer conceded only five runs with Dhoni and India needing 11 for victory. For good measure, Rabada told the press after the match about how he’d grown up watching Dhoni finish off matches and here he was getting the better of him.

  He did seem to turn back the clock during the 2018 IPL in terms of his power-hitting and power-finishing. While Chennai Super Kings’ third title win in their comeback season was the big story of the tournament’s eleventh edition, a more charming postscript of their journey was how ‘old’ Dhoni had started batting like the Dhoni of old.

  Some of the cricketers he grew up playing cricket with in Ranchi recall him having only one rule about run chases which shockingly was: ‘Never take it till the last over. Finish it off before that.’ Maybe Dhoni was still to discover his penchant for sudden death back then. (The other surprise is that he didn’t always have this unabashed aversion to the media, but we’ll come to that in the relevant chapter.)

  ‘He has always been the same person’ is a tribute to Dhoni you hear everywhere. Right from his MECON Colony mates to schoolmates to teammates to coaches, and even the security chief at the Ranchi stadium, everyone says that about him. Col Shankar reasons that Dhoni is able to be the same because of his two staunch principles in life—‘control the controllables’ and that ‘no man can have everything in life, there’s always that one thing you will never be able to have’.

  ‘He can only control what is in his control. So that’s all that bothers him. Like, if you get up and go right now while I’m talking, what can I do about it? It’s a simple logic and easier said than followed. But he does it,’ says Col Shankar. Dhoni’s belief that no man can have everything in life is an interesting premise. It is almost like asking you to seek out that one thing you can never have and almost develop the confidence that you can achieve everything else, however unachievable it may seem.

  In Dhoni’s case, and I’m sticking my neck out here a little, it might well be about learning swimming—at least that’s what Chittu implies. Apparently, Dhoni tried learning how to swim back in 2007 soon after the World T20 win in South Africa, and just couldn’t master it. Maybe he has become better at it now, but Chittu recalls this as something that bothered him back then.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it. There was something that even Mahi couldn’t learn well. Both Mahi and I had enrolled for lessons at the Birsa Club, but neither of us ever managed to go beyond the four-feet mark,’ Chittu recalls. It’s kind of funny that he makes this disclosure while we are next to the swimming pool at the JSCA stadium, after he’s successfully thwarted the local swimming coach’s attempts at getting him to give the pool another shot.

  It was at the JSCA stadium that I got a very discernible glimpse into both Dhoni’s magnanimity towards those he considers his people and the magnitude to which he’s revered. Chittu introduced me to everyone as the author of this new book on Mahi and how he was showing me around. And wherever he took me, and at the JSCA stadium in particular, I was given an overwhelming reception.

  ‘Sir, you are writing on our superstar. That makes you a superstar too. You are our guest of honour,’ one official tells me. As flattering as it sounds, I’m taken aback simply by the enormity of the love that Dhoni enjoys in these parts. Though I refuse the same official’s attempts at convincing me to stay back for a beer, he ensures that I get dropped back at my hotel in his fancy car, and he even opens the back door to usher me in for good measure. Superstar indeed.

  Manoj-bhaiya, the security incharge at the JSCA stadium, whom Dhoni wishes on 1 January every year like I mentioned before, is a muscular and robust figure who never stops smiling. He turns guide for me and takes me around the facility where Dhoni spends three to four hours every day when he’s in town. Nearly every room in the stadium offices has at least a couple of items—be it memorabilia or the exercise apparatus in the case of the gymnasium—that was donated by Dhoni. Manoj-bhaiya receives a forewarning about Dhoni’s visit either from the man himself or from Chittu in the morning, and he immediately makes sure that the necessary measures are put in place for the man’s arrival. Dhoni’s schedule is rather fixed. An hour or so at the gym—at times with Chittu in tow, and then most of the time is spent making fun of his paunch—followed by a game of pool in the billiards’ room. And then if he’s in the mood, Dhoni and Manoj-bhaiya set off for a few laps around the stadium. It’s during these jogs that Dhoni shows his inquisitive side again, inquiring about Manoj-bhaiya’s time in the military and his life in general.

  Dhoni insisted on Manoj-bhaiya being with him in February 2017 when the former ‘ticket collector’ travelled in a train for the first time in thirteen years with the Jharkhand team for the Vijay Hazare Trophy in Kolkata—from Ranchi to Howrah. ‘He was amazing. I stayed up all night despite all the necessary precautions having been put in place, and he too spent most of the time awake, making fun of the boys, telling them stories and chatting with me. He literally didn’t sleep, I remember. And the next day when we disembarked, he went straight to the hotel and, I think, slept for the entire day,’ Manoj-bhaiya tells me.

  As the guided tour nearly comes to an end, Chittu points at an incomplete structure, say two-storey high and with foundations laid for what looks like rectangular rooms. ‘Aur kitne din lagega, bhaiya? (How many more days it will take to finish?),’ he asks the security head. It’s a small complex to house badminton courts, which Chittu tells me, are mainly being put in place for Mahi to indulge in his favourite pastime.

  ‘The problem is whenever he comes here, he’ll start playing there with someone or the other,’ he says, pointing at an open space under the stands to the right of the pavilion area. ‘It’s really slippery there and we always get worried that he shouldn’t slip and hurt himself. The JSCA guys anyway wanted a couple of badminton courts but thanks to Mahi they are getting it done earlier than planned,’ says Chittu.

  ‘I asked him for Reebok shoes. Lotto wala. He bought it himself. I still have it and wear it on and off. Keep cleaning and wearing it. Yaadgaar hai. (It’s memorable.) He bought me the most expensive car I’ve had, a Scorpio. My first bike he gave,’ Chittu lists away.

  In his younger days, Chittu’s house was Dhoni’s getaway. Since his mother would be away at work, the flat was empty through the day and the two would spend time trying their hand in the kitchen and debating over whose chai-making skills were worse. The frequency of visits naturally reduced over time, but even now the only house Dhoni doesn’t ever hesitate going to is Chittu’s. There was one visit, however, that Chittu wasn’t aware of, and that is what he considers the apotheosis of his friendship with Mahi.

  ‘I used to run a business with a partner. At one point he duped me, and I lost a lot of money. I w
as at my wits’ end and didn’t know what to do. I was feeling a sense of shame too and didn’t want to ask Mahi for help even though I knew I could. One of those days, I returned home dejectedly to find my mother looking very relaxed for a change. As soon as I entered, she said, “Tu darr kyun raha hai, Mahi ne aake bola hai sab theek kar dega woh. (Why are you afraid; Mahi came and said he will set everything right.)” I started sobbing because I couldn’t believe he had gone directly and met my mother without informing me,’ he says.

  When Mahi comes visiting his home, Chittu says no lavish arrangements have to be made. ‘Despite having reached such a stature, he’s got no ghammand (arrogance). Usko bolo, neeche baitho, baith jaayega . . . . jo khaana do, kha lega . . . koi naatak nahi hai . . . Suljha hua hai bahut andhar se. (If you ask him to sit on the floor, he’ll sit on the floor. He’ll eat whatever you’ve prepared, without a fuss. He’s a very sorted person.)’

  7

  A Captain Comes into His Own

  In February 2008, India were chasing down a facile total of 160 against Australia in the Commonwealth Bank Series at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG). It was only the fifteenth ODI as captain for Dhoni, and he was at the crease with Rohit Sharma. With 10 runs to win, he called for a needless change of gloves. In cricket, it’s generally with a pair of gloves that you see information arriving from the dressing room. Dhoni was doing the opposite though. He was sending a poignant message back to the pavilion. ‘Nobody will celebrate on the balcony once we win this match.’

  Meanwhile in the middle, Dhoni was handing down instructions to Rohit, on how the youngster should conduct himself while shaking hands with the Aussies once the match got over. He wanted it to be as tepid as possible. ‘When they give their hand, just firmly hold yours out without folding it like an obligation, but don’t overdo it. And just stare blankly at them without any hint of excitement.’

  This was back when the Australians were still at their indomitable best. Beating them meant a big deal to any opposition, that too in their own backyard at the mighty MCG. It was a period when Ricky Ponting’s team believed that every loss was an ‘upset’ and not just a win for their opponents. India had dominated this particular match from the beginning. Ishant Sharma, Sreesanth and Irfan Pathan had gathered nine wickets between them and shot out the hosts for just 159. India had more or less cruised to their target and now Dhoni the rookie wanted to give his all-conquering, world-beating counterpart his version of the cold shoulder.

  ‘This was Mahi’s way of saying it’s no big deal. My bowlers got them all out for 160 and we are chasing it down, usme kaunse badi baat hai (there’s no big deal in it). If we celebrate wildly, the Aussies will be vindicated in their belief that this was an upset. We wanted to tell them that this is not a fluke. This is going to happen over and over again. The Aussies simply couldn’t handle it. They were shaken,’ a player from that tour revealed much later.

  That wasn’t the only time during the Commonwealth Bank Series, which India eventually ended up winning, when Dhoni got the better of the Aussies at their own ‘mental disintegration’ game. Like he does with everything else, the Indian captain did it in his own style, without ever going overboard.

  A few of the younger players in the team had told Dhoni that one of Australia’s premier batsmen not known to hold back from expressing his thoughts about an opponent on the field, had been pressurizing and sledging every one of them when they were batting. And that when one responded in kind, the player asked the youngster to show him some respect. So, the next time he walked out to open the innings, Dhoni lined up all the juniors near the boundary line in a mock guard of honour. And all they kept saying to the burly Australian was, ‘respect, respect, respect’, as he walked towards the middle. ‘It was Mahi’s way of saying, “Aapko maangke respect chahiye na. Yeh le lo respect. (You want respect on demand. Here it is.),”’ says a former teammate.

  The one-day leg of this tour came at the heels of a tumultuous Test series which, in addition to the Monkeygate fiasco, had seen the two teams at each other’s throats on and off the field. India felt robbed in Sydney when a few umpiring decisions, from Steve Bucknor in particular, went against them—this was six months before the birth of the decision review system (DRS). Anil Kumble, the Test captain, had left for home at the end of the Test series but not before declaring: ‘Only one team is playing in the spirit of the game.’ India won the next Test in Perth but lost the series.

  Ponting and Co. were all set for an encore in the one-day series. Dhoni, still only into his fourth year of international cricket and on his first foreign assignment as captain in the ODIs, was left to face the heat. He did it his own way—he reduced the friction between the two sides by simply not reacting to any stimuli. The Aussies were flabbergasted. This was M.S. Dhoni’s style of war without bloodshed. It worked, and in the end he had a trophy to show for it.

  ‘Goli maarta hai apne style mein. (He shoots in his own style.) He says the problem is if I allow my boys to give maa–behen ki gaali (swear words involving someone’s mother or sister); it’s they and not the one being subjected to it who’ll feel the pinch of what they’ve done for the rest of the day,’ one of Dhoni’s close friends explains.

  ‘He doesn’t believe in overt displays of aggression. He believes that if you want to hurt them, do it in your style, not in their way. If they believe in swearing, you don’t need to do it,’ he adds.

  Incidentally, seven years and two tours later, Dhoni hadn’t changed his opinion on the matter. In the 2014–15 Test series in Australia, which was riddled with incidents of players like Virat Kohli, David Warner and Brad Haddin being at each other’s throats, Dhoni spoke about how he never held his players back from a confrontation, but only asked them never to get personal. It’d been his opinion throughout.

  Dhoni wasn’t just good at defusing tetchy situations with the opposing team. He could, at times, put his own teammates at ease in a tense scenario. Take the 2013 IPL final. Chennai Super Kings had been in the trenches. The spot-fixing saga was at its peak and throwing up names and scandals on a daily basis. Their team principal, who was later described as a ‘cricket enthusiast’, was out on bail. The team was under the pump. The players had been in a lockdown at the hotel.

  As the CSK players prepared for the customary huddle near the boundary ropes, Dhoni sensed the tension around him. Vexed faces, local and foreign, all waiting for their captain to speak magic words of inspiration and motivation.

  Dhoni stuck to his straight-faced approach. He said, ‘Boys, we are second on the IPL Fair Play Award rankings. I want us to do everything we can to finish on top of that list. Good luck.’ And he was off. Later, he told a teammate that it was his way of breaking the tension. But back in 2008, Indian cricket was just getting used to their new captain. He did things differently. He wasn’t in-your-face like Ganguly or passive-aggressive like Dravid; he wasn’t laid-back like Azharuddin or a genius expecting everyone else to be one, like Tendulkar; and he could never match Kumble for his intensity. He had his own ideas, and in all likelihood, more conviction than any other Indian captain before him, about his own ideas. You can say he might even have started a trend, looking at how Virat Kohli takes calls on and off the field.

  Former Bihar and Jharkhand captain Tarique-ur-Rehman describes his one-time teammate’s approach to captaincy, and maybe even life, perfectly: ‘Mahi is convinced that his funda is the correct funda. More often than not, his fundas just come off.’

  Nobody has quite acclimatized to the captaincy role as rapidly and unassumingly as Dhoni has in Indian cricket history. There might have been those who’d played fewer matches who got the job. But there was no precedent for a youngster who was still getting used to the attention that an India cricketer receives after being suddenly thrust with this significant burden.

  T20 cricket comes in for a lot of flak around the world, and in India too. But India certainly does owe T20 cricket a huge debt. If there was no T20 cricket, and no reluctance on the p
art of the who’s who of that generation to play the format, one wonders if Dhoni would have gotten that break and eventually ended up as the most successful Indian captain across all three versions of the game. Or imagine a scenario where even one of those seniors, whether it was Tendulkar or Dravid, had decided to go to South Africa. Would Dhoni have had the free hand that he enjoyed and relished during those dramatic two weeks which changed his life forever? For all his singular and awe-inspiring attributes, you can never quite ignore the right-time–right-place serendipity that tails the man.

  He’d already shown streaks of opting for the unthinkable early in the tournament. It came during the league encounter between India and Pakistan which ended in a tie. For the bowl-out that followed, Pakistan chose their best bowlers while Dhoni’s first three picks were Virender Sehwag, Harbhajan Singh and Robin Uthappa. At that point, it made no sense.

  And while all three Pakistanis missed the target, the three Indians hit bullseye, including Uthappa. The young opener doffed his hat to the crowd too for good measure. But in that instant, maybe Indian cricket was doffing its hat too, to a new era, an era of expecting the unexpected.

  ‘I would have never even thought of giving it to Robin. But that’s what makes a leader. If you are scared of taking a call, you can’t be successful. You need guts to gamble,’ says Kiran More.

  Go watch that video of the bowl-out once again. And look out for Dhoni’s positioning behind the stumps. It’s a great example of his situational awareness and his understanding of the angles on the field.