The Dhoni Touch

by Bharat Sundaresan

  It was the kind of anger you rarely saw from Dhoni.

  The happiest I ever saw Dhoni at a press conference was arguably his last as an active player. He’d stepped down from the captaincy a few days earlier. And when asked what he wouldn’t miss much, he, not surprisingly, mentioned press conferences. ‘We don’t need press conference every day. I always felt, there is too much exposure.’ He was pretty much repeating what he’d said the day he took over as captain a decade earlier.

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  Pythagoras behind the Stumps

  It was a mundane event during the 2017 IPL final in Hyderabad. Rising Pune Supergiant skipper Steve Smith had thrown a ball in from the boundary and Dhoni had collected it behind the stumps. At that point, the wicketkeeper had provided his old coach Banerjee with a moment of nostalgia probably without even realizing it.

  ‘Hum usko pakad liya. (I noticed it.) The ball came in and at the last minute, his hands went into that machli-ka-mooh (fish-mouth) position. It was just like old times,’ the coach says, giggling. It’s basically what old-school coaches and cricket prudes consider a loutish way of catching a ball. It’s when you position your hands one above the other—rather than side by side like the manual recommends—and cup them eventually like a trapdoor shutting. Being a Bengali, it was only natural that Banerjee brought in a machli reference. And just for the record, Dhoni isn’t into seafood.

  ‘I used to constantly be on his case to change it (his catching technique). Whenever I was watching, he would do it properly. The moment my head turned away or I was talking to someone, machli ka mooh would start again,’ says Banerjee, shaking his head.

  In gully cricket, at least in urban India, how you catch a ball can often be the deciding factor between whether you are an asli (real) cricketer or a nakli (fake) one. It’s not been too different for Dhoni on the international circuit. Purists have always turned their nose up at his wicketkeeping technique only because it is different, slightly ungainly even. But how do you pick on someone who sits third on the list of all-time highest dismissals among wicketkeepers across formats? Not to forget the man who’s stumped more batsmen than anyone else in history. Former Australian opener Michael Slater called him ‘the fastest gloves in the west’.

  ‘People talk about his technique a lot and say that it’s bad. I never bought that. He’s a street-smart wicketkeeper. And if at the right time you don’t take the bails off, what’s the point of having a perfect technique? MS has redefined stumpings,’ says Kiran More, not a slouch himself behind the stumps.

  Dhoni, if anything, has redefined the right time to take the bails off. He does it three frames quicker than his counterparts. That is two frames quicker than what the batsman has to get his foot back in the crease, which is nigh impossible. And it’s no overstatement to say that he almost seems to stop time itself while executing one of his trademark stumpings.

  ‘He’s the standard bearer when it comes to stumpings. We’re all trying to get to at least 50–60 per cent of the speed at which he whips the bails off,’ Dinesh Karthik had told me while I was working on a piece trying to decipher the Dhoni way of wicketkeeping some two years ago.*

  Someone who was scoffed at for not heeding the wicketkeeping manual, seems to now be one step ahead of it. He’s certainly quite a few steps ahead of the poor batsman. That front popping crease must feel like a landmine marking for a batsman when he has Dhoni lurking behind him. He’s always just one wrong step on the wrong side of the crease away from disaster. This is white-line fever of a totally new kind, all thanks to Dhoni. It is cricket’s own lakshman rekha.

  The MMA-type speed he generates comes from a variety of factors. But it’s mainly to do with his singular style of collecting the ball behind the stumps. No, we’re not talking about machli ka mooh here. That’s only when the coach isn’t looking or when Dhoni is feeling nostalgic.

  Dhoni ‘uses force to absorb force’ with his hands. Most keepers do what other mortals do, which is, push their hands back to cushion the blow after catching the ball. That’s how they absorb the force. That’s how they produce the ‘give’ to ensure the ball doesn’t pop out. Dhoni, though, is pushing forward, as in, generating ‘give’ in the direction from which the ball is coming.

  It’s like when you are getting off a train and the nearest exit on the platform is behind you. While all others would step out in the direction in which the train’s moving, stop their momentum and then turn around, Dhoni, you imagine, wouldn’t have to worry about the tiny detour. He could just as well jump straight out against the momentum of the train, and look as unperturbed as ever while doing so.

  In fact, this analogy perhaps stands true for his running between the wickets too. Never will you see Dhoni over-running, as in he puts on the brakes with his running exactly when he needs to with relation to the crease. It means that he never wastes even an extra millisecond in turning around for the second or third run, and that makes him one of the best runners in the world. Then there’s the natural speed across the 22 yards that’s hardly diminished even now in his late thirties. Dhoni still takes great pride in being the fastest in the Indian dressing room in short-distance running. ‘The day there’s someone who’s faster than me in a 50-metre sprint, I’ll know it’s time to go,’ he’s known to tell teammates in jest.

  The unbelievable thing is that he doesn’t push forward with hard hands either, which would get the ball to pop out more often than not. The wrists remain supple enough to soak in all the force. And we’re not always talking spinners here either. Dhoni has even stood up to the likes of Irfan Pathan at his peak and pulled off stumpings.

  It’s just another example of his unbelievable natural strength. Those forearms are the reason he generates such power with the helicopter shot. They are also responsible for why he’s been able to rewrite the physics of wicketkeeping.

  His teammates don’t need an illustration of their former captain’s brute strength. But he doesn’t mind reminding them of it on occasions. Once, towards the end of a practice session, the Indian players, led by Virat Kohli, decided to have a competition. The object was to stand beyond the boundary ropes and see how far they could underarm a ball. Dhoni had just finished his nets session and was packing his gear. But as he saw the others go through with it, he got tempted. It was, of course, a unique opportunity for Dhoni to do something he rarely gets to do—throw the ball from the outfield to the centre. It took him a single turn to be declared winner. His underarm flick saw the ball land one bounce on the pitch. Game over.

  ‘His stumpings turned heads even back then. In that same school final where he scored all those runs, what I remember most is him getting five stumpings. I told him he’s taken five wickets. He stood up to everyone back then, fast bowlers, spinners, everyone,’ says coach Banerjee.

  Kiran More, though, believes Dhoni’s self-taught technique of collecting the ball often overshadows the skill that actually deserves the limelight—his positioning. The former selector believes that his positioning gives him the extra two seconds and a 90 per cent strike rate as a stumper. He likens it to how Tendulkar could read the length of the ball from the time the bowler released it.

  ‘When your positioning is so good, you will make it look that easy, especially for someone with such soft hands as MS. If you’re not in position, you have to move your hands that extra bit more and you lose time. It’s like batting. If you’re in line with the ball, you’ll connect with it every time. You’ll never see MS being late to a ball. He’s already there. That’s because he knows where the ball or the throw from the boundary is going to come and where he needs to stand. It reduces his reaction time,’ he explains, adding that the only other keeper he has seen being as quick was England’s Bob Taylor.

  In addition to the strength, the technique and the positioning, Dhoni’s eye for detail is what makes him such an unforgiving judge, jury and executioner from behind the stumps. It is, in Col Shankar’s opinion, another one of his friend’s fauji traits.

  Of
ficers and soldiers are both made to develop through repeated drills the ability to spot the slightest thing that’s amiss. It could often be the difference between winning or losing a battle. ‘Somebody will do the drill and he’ll make some intentional mistakes where you’re expected to pick them out. Some will be very evident but most will be subtle and be hidden by a larger action. It’s basically done so that we are always aware when things are even slightly out of place, especially while on patrol,’ Shankar says.

  Dhoni, he says, is naturally gifted with that skill. Anything that’s not routine always catches his eye. It’s the reason why he’s so spot-on with his observations from behind the stumps about a batsman’s movements or intentions. How often have we heard spinner after spinner attribute a chunk of his success to the advice that comes from Dhoni?

  Kuldeep Yadav, India’s latest chinaman sensation, and Yuzvendra Chahal never failed to mention Dhoni’s contribution to their unprecedented, if not prodigious, success during the one-day leg of India’s tour to South Africa in early 2018. ‘As a spinner, he (Dhoni) does 50 per cent of your work because he has played so much cricket; he reads the batsmen easily,’ Yadav had said after his maiden outing on South African soil, saying how Dhoni had asked him to ‘bowl as he was bowling’ after he’d been confused about the strong wind and the resultant drift on the ball at Durban. ‘From behind the stumps, Mahi-bhai always keeps advising you. He knows what the batsman is going to try. It makes it easier for us,’ Chahal had said after snaring seven wickets in the first two matches of that series.

  ‘I’m able to see how a batsman stands and how he reacts, and tell the bowler this is what he’s going to do. It could be that he’s moved an inch this side or that side or something even subtler,’ he’d once explained to the colonel. There was the stumping of Bangladesh’s Sabbir Rahman in the 2016 World T20 tournament. Not only was it a quick take down the leg-side, but Dhoni timed the removing of the bails at the precise moment that Sabbir raised his foot.

  This singular Dhoni trait can also be a thorn in the side for those close to him. Ask the colonel. Last year, he released one of his many caricature books—he collects caricatures which generally focus on his sporting idols—this one entirely about the players in the Pune franchise. Dhoni’s first reaction was, ‘Bahut bhadiya hai, sir. (Very good, sir.)’ He then flicked through the pages once. Within a second, he’d spotted the one factual mistake in the book.

  ‘He didn’t even turn many pages. One flick, and he tells me that Jaskaran Singh, the Jharkhand seam bowler, is a left-armer but the cartoon shows him as a right-armer,’ Shankar recalls.

  Another time when Dhoni was shown a caricature someone had made of him, he told the colonel almost immediately, ‘Isme toh mere daant hai. (I have teeth here.)’ ‘He has a couple of molars missing, but the caricature hadn’t detailed that fact. And he caught it with one look; that’s his eye for detail. It happens all the time. He’ll keep saying, “Sir, aapne woh galat kiya, woh wahan nahi hona chahiye tha. (Sir, you did it wrong; it shouldn’t be there.) It’s a constant flow,’ the colonel adds.

  Like with that Sabbir stumping, the keenness to observe has helped Dhoni challenge the old adage that good wicketkeeping is one that you don’t notice during a day’s play. That’s what they say about good drummers too. With Dhoni, you’re always expecting him to create something out of nothing. Has there been any other wicketkeeper who’s featured as much as he has in highlights packages simply for his glove work?

  ‘People get excited about how a keeper does on a turning track, but I’ve never understood the fuss. On that kind of a pitch, the keeper is always the hero. The attention is on him anyway. It’s on a flat track, where the ball comes to you once every half hour, and you still are able to be a hero that makes you a special wicketkeeper, like MS does so often,’ says More.

  In the 2016 edition of the IPL, he created not just a new trend but a new position for a wicketkeeper. It was a physical demonstration of inscrutable innovation. That bizarre-looking concoction he’d stewed by lifting his right leg at a right angle and parallel to the ground to thwart a batsman’s late-cut attempts. I’d called him cricket’s Pythagoras at that point and even described his manoeuvre using the primordial theorem to back the coinage. Dhoni’s Pythagoras move first appeared during Rising Pune Supergiant’s outing against Kings XI Punjab on 17 April 2016.

  ‘He ensures that his gloves remain in their original place. For, by creating the angle that he does with his extended foot, Dhoni does manage to double his reach while having both his hands and legs in perfect positions to stop the ball.’ That’s how I’d described it.

  When Dhoni isn’t creating scenarios, he’s using his presence of mind to manipulate or influence them. The stumping of David Warner during the league encounter against Australia at the 2016 World T20 tourney in Mohali was one such example. He’d softened his left hand at the last moment to ensure that the ball didn’t bounce out but rather bounced off it and landed right back in the gloves for him to pull the stumping off. There was also that last-over runout in a World T20 against Bangladesh where he ran in from behind the stumps, not to speak of the dozens and hundreds of those during his career.

  They don’t always have to result in a dismissal. During a tense finish to a Mumbai vs Pune IPL league match at the Wankhede stadium, Dan Christian had taken an extremely low catch on the boundary and rolled the ball back in. The entire Pune team naturally rushed towards the Australian all-rounder in delight. The catch meant that Pune were now favourites to win the contest. All except Dhoni. He instead focused on the stray ball and ran across to his left to collect it. It was a low catch, and he knew that camera angles could easily cast doubts over the legality of the catch, or at least create illusionary doubts. So, why risk that and give away an overthrow four. That’s how Dhoni’s brain works. It never stops. It’s always on the ball. The conclusion of the match is a dramatic one. A controversial wide call leads to a stoppage in play as the Mumbai Indians’ skipper Rohit Sharma marches up to umpire S. Ravi for what would turn out to be a clarification regarding the wide rule. Dhoni remains unmoved with his hands behind his back. Next ball, Rohit is out caught by bowler Jaidev Unadkat off a top-edged skier. In the process, Unadkat’s head hits the hard square and he is writhing in pain. The entire team rushes to see if he’s okay. Dhoni, instead, walks to umpire Ravi and seeks clarification on whether Rohit and Harbhajan Singh had crossed each other when the catch was being taken. That would mean Harbhajan would be on strike for the next delivery. The Dhoni brain never stops whirring. It’s always, always on the ball.

  V.B. Chandrasekhar says it’s the ability to read the pulse of a batsman from behind the stumps that has made Dhoni such a successful wicketkeeper and an intuitive captain in limited-overs cricket. He brings up the case of the fielder whom he’d placed in the 2010 IPL final to get rid of Kieron Pollard—right behind the bowler.

  ‘He seems to feel the vibrations from a batsman and tell where he’s likely to hit the ball. He’s also got an unbelievable sense of angles on a cricket field, like that fielder for Pollard proves,’ says Chandrasekhar.

  It’s perhaps the fact that batsmen aren’t as anxious to score or play more shots in the longer format that didn’t work in Dhoni’s favour as a Test captain. Unlike in ODIs and T20s, he rarely seemed to be a step ahead of the game. In most cases, as a Test captain, he was playing catch-up. And he never seemed at his best doing that. It must be said that he didn’t always have the kind of bowling attack required to generate pressure on the opposition on away tours.

  Dhoni, the Test wicketkeeper, had a few hiccups too. It generally came away from home when he would often not go for a catch when the ball flew between him and the slips. There were also times in England, especially during the 2011 tour, where he had problems with the ball moving a lot after passing the batsman. He wasn’t the first foreign keeper to fall victim to this quirk in English conditions. Kiran More recalls how Dhoni had called him to his room to discuss the issue.
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  ‘We spoke about hand positions and leg positions. He’s a smart learner and he understands even the minute points. It doesn’t need to be hands-on coaching with him. You discuss one point with him and he’ll immediately pick it up and work with it,’ says More. It’s a quality that M.P. Singh, who was Dhoni’s coach at the national stadium in Delhi and played a huge role in his development as a wicketkeeper, too raves about. Dhoni, to date, never fails to touch Singh’s feet whenever they meet.

  ‘If someone says something cannot be done, then Mahi will make sure that he disproves them by overcoming that challenge. And you get to see this tendency even while he is practising in the nets,’ Singh says.

  Dhoni, though, for no fault of his, might be responsible for a lot of young wicketkeepers in the country not practising their art enough. R. Sridhar, India’s fielding coach, once said that he’d seen Dhoni practise his keeping thrice in the two years he’d been with the national team. Dhoni has got a similar theory about T20 cricket and not fussing too much over it during practice. It’s almost like he believes that they know enough cricket to just go out there and play their game and not bother about overdoing the practice.

  More says it’s a trend that he has seen catching on among the younger wicketkeepers and how he ends up having to give them the same lecture about what works for Dhoni will never work for anyone who’s not Dhoni. ‘I’ve seen Sunil Gavaskar not practising much, keep leaving balls, get bowled three to ten times, and next day, hit the ball as sweetly as ever in the match. But he was special like Dhoni. MS too does his own drills. He plays badminton for his eyesight, for example,’ says More.