The summer of 2005 will for ever be regarded as the most vivid in the memory of those who celebrated or suffered England’s victory in the Ashes to emerge from a sea of disappointment that at one point seemed to have no horizon. But England ending 18 years of subjugation by Australia was not the only entry of note in the following Wisden Almanack.
At Visakhapatnam on India’s sprawling eastern coast that April, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the son of a railway ticket collector from the north, hit the first of his 359 career sixes for India to build the foundations of a maiden one‑day century of such scintillating brilliance the Pakistan bowlers were reduced to hands-on-hips awe.
For the next 15 years, he would repeat his elegant, murderous hitting nearly everywhere he went, with lapses to remind us of his mortality, followed just as quickly by revivals, as if he were riding a wave beyond his control. And, when he was elevated to the captaincy of the one-day team then the Test side, expectations grew like a storm.
Yet Dhoni seemed not to buckle, as others sometimes did. Captaining India at cricket surely has the sharpest double-edged dividend in sport. It is a rarefied place that 33 players have been to since they joined the five Test-playing nations in 1932, and the leadership of such a volatile and passionate nation has broken some, elevated others. The price they have all paid is privacy and comfort. Sachin Tendulkar, famously, could go driving in his fancy car only in the middle of the night.
None has done the job more often or more successfully than Dhoni, the 31st so honoured, in Tests or the shorter forms: 60 Tests, 27 wins, 18 defeats and 15 draws; a mountainous 200 in one-day internationals, with 110 wins, 74 losses, five ties and 11 no-results for a winning return of 58% in completed games; and, in Twenty20 matches he captained India to 41 wins out of 72.
Those are just numbers, as is his Test average of 38.09, considered by some as paltry when compared with his contemporaries’. Dhoni, who played the last of his 90 Tests in 2014 (the same year Chris Gayle left Test matches behind), cared little for such details, and a lot for the end result, as well as the manner of its delivery.
His metier was over 50 and 20 overs, and, when on song, he created the sweetest symphonies. It is telling that he averaged 50.57 in 350 ODIs, and 37.60 in 98 Twenty20 games at the highest level. Dhoni epitomised the modern batsman and the modern game.
It has been an enthralling journey. As Dhoni plundered with the bat, and whipped bails away with the quickest gloves in the game since Bob Taylor, a billion Indians loved him for his often exasperating genius.
When he confirmed on Saturday that he was retiring from international cricket, it was as if the Ganges had burst its banks in a flood of uncontrolled emotion – even though, at 39, he looked to have timed his departure as perfectly as the six he hit to win the World Cup in 2011.
Indeed, he might have crafted his exit with telling symmetry, say his devoted followers. One even claimed he announced his retirement at 7.29pm his time on Instagram because it matched the same tick of the clock as the moment when the World Cup semi‑final lost to New Zealand ended last summer. Not quite – but close enough to buttress the legend.
Nevertheless, Dhoni always gave the impression of mastering his own rhythm, regardless of what was going on around him. Sometimes, it cost India victory; mostly it did not. He was as deadly a finisher as the Australian Michael Bevan according to Shane Warne, during the rain break in the second England-Pakistan Test at Southampton on Saturday.
As Nasser Hussain pointed out in that conversation: “This will be a massive, massive story in India. The only story in India.”
Indeed it was. And is. Soumya Bhattacharya, author and cricket writer, described eloquently why this would be so in his delightful 2006 love poem to the game, You Must Like Cricket? Memoirs Of An Indian Cricket Fan.
“You need to see us to really know the answer to that,” he writes in response to his book’s own question, “see us out on the streets in the afternoon heat, radiant faces shining through all the colours on this Sunday afternoon.”
The afternoon of which Bhattacharya spoke was the completion of India’s first ever Test win at Eden Gardens over Pakistan, earlier in that summer of 2005, a victory that preceded Dhoni’s explosive arrival. In his first appearance the previous year, he was run out for a first-ball duck against Bangladesh in Chittagong. But his recall was inevitable.
His career is not entirely over. Dhoni will resume playing next month for Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League, and is likely to build more hundreds there for a while yet.
He undoubtedly is worth his place at the top table of one-day players in the modern era, and there has been much social media chat about who should make an all-time XI, Dhoni or Adam Gilchrist. Both were so good with bat and gloves it would be odd to exclude either of them, even if it unbalanced a batting lineup.
Who would really care? They led the way for wicketkeeper-batsmen, setting impossibly high standards, and lifting cricket into a realm of one-day (or one-night) entertainment that seemed inconceivable in a previous generation. Now it is the centrepiece of cricket in most countries.
Those who know him best are in no doubt about Dhoni’s worth. “Winning the 2011 World Cup together has been the best moment of my life,” Tendulkar told him.
Hussain got it right too: “Probably the best white‑ball captain there has ever been. A great finisher. It wasn’t over until you got Dhoni out. A phenomenally calm, cool customer.”
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