The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  He’s kneeling right behind the stumps but not too far or too close to them. It’s the perfect distance where his width and those of the stumps seem congruent when seen from the bowling end. So, for Sehwag, Harbhajan and Uthappa, Dhoni doesn’t play the role of a keeper but adds almost an extra dimension to the target in their sights. In this position, he also ensures there’s no distraction for the bowler. It’s a geometrical marvel.

  You just have to see Kamran Akmal’s position to understand Dhoni’s brilliance in this case. Akmal takes his normal position, slightly to the right of off-stump, for the likes of Umar Gul and Yasir Arafat. While Arafat slips a full-toss outside off-stump, Gul ends up bowling a beautiful length delivery that would have tempted a right-hander, if there was one in position, into playing at it.

  Dhoni’s decision to give Joginder Sharma the final over of the World T20 final, with Misbah-ul-Haq on strike, is always used to illustrate his ingenuity. That decision has been well highlighted over the years. It was a calculated gamble based on the skills that the Haryana medium-pacer had displayed in the nets. It was also, says More, an instance of the unique Dhoni skill to match real-life situations with cricket.

  ‘Often in life, the best person to go to in a desperate scenario is one who has nothing to lose. Joginder fit the bill perfectly, and all he wanted to hear was his captain say that he trusted him,’ says More. Dhoni himself has often spoken about his captaincy as being based around gut-feel and using the experiences he’s had in life. There are enough instances of those to fill up another book. How about the cheeky tactics he suggests to bowlers like untying and tying their shoelaces in the last over of an innings, especially in a run chase, to play with the batsman’s mind and ruin their momentum.

  ‘He has more confidence in his decisions than most of us normal people. All decisions he takes himself, and has had nobody to blame if they haven’t worked out. He’s never scared of taking a decision,’ says Chittu.

  It wasn’t only on the field that Dhoni could pull a fast one on the opponent. He’d done it with the Pakistani team before that very final. On the eve of the match, Dhoni had spoken at length about the importance of Sehwag to the Indian team whenever they were playing Pakistan, even mentioning his great record against them.

  Sehwag, it would be later revealed, was never in line to even play having pulled his hamstring a couple of days before the final. ‘Getting Viru to just face a few balls in the nets was Mahi’s googly. He said, “Why do we need to make it public or let the Pakistan team know that Sehwag isn’t playing? Let them waste an hour worrying about Sehwag during their team meeting,”’ says Chittu.

  The first thing Dhoni does upon entering a dressing room for a practice session is have a cup or two of chai. Only then does he move on to cricketing activities. Meanwhile, within those walls, among his teammates, Dhoni is in the quest for banter.

  When it came to communication within the dressing room, Dhoni also liked to maintain an honour code. That’s why those who have shared the dressing room with him say that the one guaranteed way to get into the captain’s bad books was by leaking any information. To my knowledge, there has been at least one player who has suffered Dhoni’s wrath for having passed some on, and never been pardoned.

  Dhoni demands a jovial atmosphere within the dressing room at all times. ‘He has that kind of humour where he’ll say one line with a straight face, and it’ll hit you a few seconds later. He would already have started laughing by then,’ says a former teammate.

  Col Shankar who’s spent a lot of time in Dhoni’s hotel rooms adds that a good repartee is what gets his friend going the most. ‘He loves it. Kedar Jadhav, in the present bunch, is great with his one-liners. And MS is so fond of them that he’ll suddenly bring it up out of nowhere and say, “Sir, yaad hai (remember), I said this and Kedar ne woh jawaab diya (Kedar gave that answer),” and start laughing.’

  A former teammate says anyone could mistake Dhoni to be a close friend simply because he is unassuming and accessible. However, only very few are allowed access beyond a point. It is almost a perfect mirror of how he is in the outside world. At most points in his career, Dhoni has had his own ‘crew’ or a bunch of teammates who he’ll hang out with more than others. In some cases, because of him being captain, it has raised eyebrows and even led to ridicule whenever one among his crew is assumed to have been given a longer rope than someone not in it.

  In later years, Dhoni has taken a different outlook—that of the senior citizen going out of his way to welcome the new entrants into the dressing room. This avatar of his really came to the fore in Zimbabwe in 2016 when he captained a team of second-stringers—players like Manish Pandey and Yuzvendra Chahal who have since cemented their place in the limited-overs’ teams. While many in his position would have considered this a graveyard shift, he made the most of it, spending long hours in the nets with the youngsters. He also ensured that they spent time in his room, and ordered in food, while also playing PlayStation games with them and—winning.

  Some say this is Dhoni’s way of making up for not getting to meet new people most of the time and being cocooned in his room. The more you speak to those who’ve spent considerable time with him, you realize that trust and loyalty are not mere words for him, he truly believes in them.

  ‘At times it could get funny. Muralitharan used to speak a lot in Tamil and Dhoni would say please only Hindi or English. Poor Murali then would only speak with those big eyes to the Tamilians in the team,’ says a former CSK player.

  You’ll hear a lot of former cricketers nominate Dhoni as the one captain they would have loved to play under. Kiran More says that has mainly got to do with the fact that there was no real communication gap within the team under his reign.

  There were, of course, a few times when there was a hitch in communication, but that was again handled well by Dhoni, says More, adding that he has always been transparent about whether certain players fit in the scheme of things or not. The writing, he says, was always on the wall and not in the air. ‘He lets the team know what he thinks when they let him down. He backs them when they are down, but when they win, he’s not there.’

  Most of Dhoni’s strong convictions about his relationships and how he handles them within the cricketing sphere can be traced back to certain incidents. His pet peeve over confidential information from selection meetings being leaked out came to a head in 2008, his first year of captaincy, when a newspaper report claimed that he’d got into a ‘heated exchange’ with the selectors over left-arm pacer R.P. Singh being dropped in favour of Irfan Pathan. The article had even gone on to claim that ‘he (Dhoni) would quit if he didn’t have his way’. This was during the one-day series against England at home. A clearly upset Dhoni addressed the media prior to the fourth ODI in Bangalore and though he never quite admitted to there being differences with the selection committee, he did express his ‘disgust’ over such reports and the issues that they could potentially cause between the players.

  ‘In a scenario like this, you have to get in touch with both R.P. Singh and Irfan Pathan and ensure that there are no differences. RP shouldn’t feel that I’m going out of the way in supporting him, nor should Irfan feel unwanted,’ he’d said. He’d then emphasized his view that the confidentiality between the captain and the selectors should be respected at all times. ‘I don’t know from where the reports came from. What happens inside while the selectors and the captains are there, if it comes out, it’s disgusting, it’s disrespecting. I think if they are supposed to come out, it’s better (that) we have live television in the room there. What happens, nobody should know apart from the eight guys who are sitting down,’ Dhoni had insisted.

  But when it came to the media, both communication and trust weren’t his greatest traits. For someone who has spent half his life endorsing and promoting cell-phone networks, Dhoni has always remained ‘out of coverage area’ as far as journalists are concerned.

  Dhoni’s relationship with the media hit an all-time low
after India’s embarrassing exit from the 2007 World Cup, when the team was back home within the first ten days of the lengthy tournament.

  Dhoni spent a few days in Delhi and upon returning to Ranchi, would lock himself up in Chittu’s house most part of the day and not meet anyone. Since everyone in Ranchi knew that a black Scorpio parked in front of Chittu’s house can mean only one thing, Dhoni would insist on the door being bolted and locked from the outside to ward off anyone trying to sneak up on him.

  So, Chittu makes quite a revelation when he says that there was a time when Dhoni was close to the local journalists. ‘It was in my house where he would often call them over after each of his early cricketing feats, and I have served chai to them myself. But the reactions after the 2007 World Cup and a few unsavoury comments changed everything. After winning the World T20, he didn’t bother about them and came straight home from the airport,’ Chittu says.

  The Dhoni interview is the ultimate El Dorado for an Indian cricket journalist, simply for the reason that it hasn’t happened for nearly a decade. And those who were fortunate enough to have sat him down for an on-the-record chat before he became captain recall a candid, polite and punctual young man. In the years since, the proclamation ‘I interviewed Dhoni once’ has become a sure-shot way to attract attention in press boxes and press clubs around the country.

  Back then, they say, if Dhoni said he’d give you an interview, you could rest assured he would. Not much has changed now, except that when Dhoni says he won’t give you an interview, you can rest assured he never will.

  A senior journalist recalls how reluctant Dhoni was to address the media upon being named the ODI captain following the 2007 series in England. It was only after the coaxing of a few old hands that he agreed. ‘I said, “Bolo din mein suraj hota hai, raat ko chand hota hai. (Just say that during the day, there is sun, and at night, there’s moon.) Say anything, but at least say a few words.” “Theek hai.”(All right.),” he said. However, he added that he doesn’t like this media exposure.’

  And Dhoni has stayed true to his word. His lengthy interview to Mark Nicholas a few years ago in England did cause considerable heartburn back home. But he’s more or less been impartial about politely turning down interview requests, even last year to Sky Sports after he was invited specially to Lord’s for a charity match.

  He isn’t the first superstar cricketer in the country to build a wall around himself. But it was different with Dhoni. Tendulkar had that aura of greatness about him. You were convinced that you could see and maybe even feel that bulwark around him. With Dhoni it was more a line. It was often invisible, but somehow you knew it couldn’t be crossed.

  I believe that to a certain extent, Dhoni got the cricket media to approach the team differently. The captains who had come before him were never so unapproachable. It wasn’t quite like how things were in the 1980s and ’90s when journalists and cricketers, including the captain, enjoyed freewheeling relationships. But the likes of Ganguly, Dravid and Tendulkar didn’t always keep journalists at arm’s length like Dhoni would.

  Ganguly, of course, had his media entourage. Even the likes of Dravid, Tendulkar and Kumble never seemed so cut off from the media as Dhoni. Perhaps as a result, or maybe it’s a coincidence, the Indian dressing room also seemed selectively porous back then. That changed with Dhoni’s arrival.

  His unflappable view that what’s said in the dressing room should stay there meant that journalists had to be particularly imaginative to find an opening. They started tapping into other sources available in the dressing room, for they had to. In his own way, and I’m guessing he had no intention of doing so, he knocked the Indian cricket media out of their comfort zone. It wasn’t always easy, like when he suddenly retired from Test cricket, in Melbourne. The team hotel went into a lockdown, with the liaison officer posted in the lobby to identify and smoke out Indian journalists who would inevitably try to make their way in to catch a whiff of how Dhoni’s shock decision had panned out. The rest of the night was spent fighting the chilly and stiff Yarra River breeze.

  I wonder how many of my colleagues have wished like me that Dhoni’s press conferences were held with him behind the stump mic rather than on a podium. Our jobs would have been so much easier. By the way, former cricketer V.B. Chandrasekhar says that most of Dhoni’s non-stop advice to the spinners is in a similar tone to the one he prefers hearing suggestions in. It’s never ‘upar daal (pitch it up), chota daal (pitch it short) or dheere daal’ (bowl slowly). It’s always ‘upar daal sakte hai . . . dheere daal sakte hai’ (you could pitch it up . . . you could bowl slowly), as if they are polite recommendations.

  A number of his wisecracks from press conferences are recounted over and over. They offer a peek into his mind. A lot of journalists take a Dhoni press briefing to be a crash course on reductio ad absurdum. My favourite Dhoni press conferences came overseas, on those rare tours where the room wasn’t brimming with Indian faces. Here he would be candid, honest and, at times, amusing. I’ll never forget his dig at Ishant Sharma after winning the tri-series in Port of Spain in 2013 with a last-over six. Asked about a slight mix-up in the running, he quipped, ‘I had just told him one ball before that if it is an easy single, we will take it, but then fast bowlers run. The fast bowler is too tall. There is much distance between the brain and the receptors.’ Back in India, he always seemed more reluctant.

  Indian captains have always made for interesting viewing at press conferences. Legend has it that Azharuddin would be so relaxed that during one such meet he was trimming his toenails while answering the questions. A Dravid press conference would often be a class on diplomacy. But he did seem happier to answer questions that sounded intelligent to him. With Sachin Tendulkar, you almost immediately knew what he thought of your question. His eyes said it all.

  Dhoni always gives you the feeling that he could have been doing something a lot more fun than telling you about his team composition. Absurd questions would amuse him. I remember one before a Kochi ODI against Australia in 2010, which witnessed so much rain that the team never even had to leave the hotel. After providing Dhoni with details of exactly how far the hotel was—in kilometres—from the stadium, airport and the market, the journalist wanted to know what the captain had been up to in those three rain-washed days. Dhoni actually complimented him for his left-field question and spoke about how he’d gotten bored of being asked about team combinations and pitch conditions. And controversial topics would generally set off his penchant for analogies.

  As captain, he didn’t always shy away or cower from facing the press. But there were times he could have come forward and perhaps provided a clearer appraisal of some of his and the team’s decisions. Like why they didn’t go for the run chase during the third Test of the 2011 tour in Dominica despite having wickets in hand. It was instead new coach Duncan Fletcher who was left to face the fire.

  There was that infamous press meet before the team’s departure for the Champions Trophy in 2013 when he simply smiled when facing volleys about the spot-fixing scandal. It was one of those moments when you thought Dhoni perhaps would have done himself less harm by just saying, ‘I won’t answer questions regarding the issue’ rather than just sit there with a strange grin on his face. As a journalist, you couldn’t help but feel like you were being mocked.

  Dhoni, though, would make it a point to be there whenever the team lost. Kohli has started doing the same these days. This wasn’t always the case in the past. Unlike teams like England, Australia and South Africa, the Indian media manager doesn’t quite make the final call on who attends the press conferences. It’s mostly the captain’s call, or on rare occasions, it’s left to the coach. Considering India has lost a lot away from home, Dhoni has put himself out there on a fair few occasions. Once even showing up in Harare after India lost a T20 after he fell short of finishing the game in the last over. I remember telling him before the media conference that the pressure, if anything, was more on me—considering there were jus
t two journalists from India covering the tour, while there were a billion or so waiting back home to hear how I put Dhoni on the spot following this upset. He seemed rather amused by that prospect.

  ‘Ice bhi pigal jaayega, lekin Dhoni nahi. (Ice melts, but not Dhoni.),’ Harbhajan had once famously said about his former captain. But even the famed Dhoni calm started eroding towards the end of his Indian captaincy tenure; constant queries about his future in the game would be met with stinging ripostes. There was also the time when he called an Australian journalist for a tête-à- tête after India were knocked out of the 2016 World T20. Sam Ferris, who works for cricket.com.au, had asked Dhoni how long he would continue to play limited-overs cricket, to which the then Indian captain invited the Australian to join him on the podium. In a bizarre turn of events, Dhoni turned inquisitor and grilled Ferris with queries like ‘Do you want me to retire?’ and ‘Do you think I’m unfit, looking at me running?’ He also said that he’d hoped it would be an Indian journalist who would ask him about his future. ‘You fired the wrong ammunition at the wrong time,’ Dhoni told Ferris in front of a packed room located underground at the Wankhede. The Aussie would then write a piece for his website about how a ‘fairly routine question for a 34-year-old skipper just eliminated from the World T20’ turned him into ‘an unwitting media spectacle’.*

  Maybe Dhoni was just trying to be funny. But the humour didn’t come across tastefully. It left a bitter taste in the mouth for many in the Indian media. ‘If you keep poking at the same wound, I will react. I am human too. Or are you saying I can’t even react like a human any more?’ he would tell a senior journalist when asked about this never-before-seen temper.

  There was another incident during that same tournament when a journalist asked Dhoni whether the narrow win over Bangladesh was satisfactory enough considering his team needed to win with a bigger margin to improve their net run rate. ‘Listen to me. Hearing you, your tone and your question, it’s clear that you aren’t happy that India has won. And when talking about a cricket match, there’s no script. It’s not about the script,’ he’d said. ‘You have to analyse that after losing the toss, what was the reason that we couldn’t make many runs on that wicket? If you aren’t analysing these things sitting outside, then you shouldn’t ask this question.’