Mahendra Singh Dhoni's bildungsroman: Long-haired iconoclast to elder statesman in blink of an eye

Early days of MS Dhoni in the international scene

It is easy to conclude that Dhoni is all about style and swagger and little else. But that would be unfair on him and also, a very incorrect conclusion to draw. Mahendra Singh Dhoni is essentially an extremely confident individual who has immense self-belief and the courage to face whatever comes his way.

In his first interview after getting selected for the Indian national team, the interviewer asked Dhoni how he felt on getting selected for the Indian team. His reply was characteristic of what everyone realized only later. “I expected to get the call much earlier” was the reply from Dhoni.

Travelling with the India-A team to Nairobi to play in a tri-nation tournament also involving Pakistan A and Kenya, Dhoni had scored 362 runs in 6 innings. And after a modest beginning to his ODI career, scoring just 19 runs in 3 matches against Bangladesh, Dhoni played his first significant innings in the second of the five-match ODI series against Pakistan.

Promoted to bat higher up the order at number 3, Dhoni scored 148 off 123 balls. Later that year, he scored a brutal 183* off just 145 balls against Sri Lanka in Jaipur and helped chase down a formidable target of 299. More than the scores, it was the manner in which these scores were achieved that caught people’s attention.

In spite of all this, it was really leading a young and inexperienced side to victory in the T20 championship in 2007 that catapulted Dhoni into limelight. While Yuvraj Singh’s feat of hitting 6 sixes in one Stuart Broad was worthy of remembering the tournament by, there was one other particularly defining moment in the tournament.

In the final against arch-rivals Pakistan, India were defending nine runs off the final over. Pakistan had lost nine wickets but they still had the impressive Misbah-ul-Haq at the crease and on-strike to face the first ball of the final over. Mahendra Singh Dhoni had one over each of Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth left but instead he went to the rather unfancied Joginder Sharma. What happened next is a part of history and a piece of the Dhoni folklore.

But in doing something that absolutely nobody expected and almost everybody would have been skeptical of if told about beforehand, Dhoni showed that he was prepared to go with his instincts even if it goes against conventional wisdom. The easiest thing to say would be that Dhoni got lucky with that decision. The more intelligent assessment of the decision would be that it was actually backed by some logic that Dhoni saw, but few others did.

Harbhajan Singh had been hit for a couple of sixes in his previous over. Sreesanth was erratic more often than not and handing him the last over was flirting with danger. Joginder Sharma was slower through the air, and the batsman had to hit him that much harder to get the same result. Yes, this too was a dangerous choice, but that is where some people get differentiated from the rest. Had India lost the game, Dhoni would have been lambasted when he returned home. But Dhoni was prepared for every consequence and believed in his wisdom.

Dhoni’s next big test was in the ODI tri-series in Australia also featuring Sri Lanka as the third team. Once again, Dhoni raised more than a few eye-brows when he decided to go with a young team leaving out the likes of Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. Only Sachin Tendulkar was left in the team from among the ‘Fab 5′ of Indian cricket.

For the first time in more than a decade, India went into an overseas series without four of the Fab 5. Once again though, Dhoni was proved right. India not only reached the finals of the tri-series, but also beat Australia in the best-of-three affair.

Dhoni’s first game as India’s Test captain came against South Africa in Kanpur in April 2008. Trailing 1-0 going into the third and final test match, India’s captain Anil Kumble had to sit out due to an injury. India won that match by eight wickets and leveled the series. While virtually everybody expected the Test captaincy too to eventually go to Dhoni, when it came, it came under surprising circumstances.

On the final day of the third Test match of the four-match series against Australia at home in October-November 2008, captain Anil Kumble ruptured the webbing of his bowling hand while attempting a return catch. The injury proved to be serious enough for Kumble to announce retirement from cricket with immediate effect. Dhoni was immediately appointed as India’s permanent Test captain.

In the final test of the series, Dhoni led India to an impressive victory and ensured a 2-0 series win. Incidentally, the other victory, in the second Test of the series also came under Dhoni’s captaincy.

In his first Test match as India’s permanent captain, Dhoni showed further signs of his smartness. Chasing India’s first innings total of 355, Australia got off to a quick start and were scoring at over five-runs-an-over at one point in their first innings.

In the first session of day-3, Dhoni set a predominantly off-side field for left-handers Simon Katich and Michael Hussey with just two fielders on the leg-side and instructed his bowlers to bowl over the wicket taking the ball across the batsmen with the angle, thus forcing the batsmen to either be patient for runs or take risks by playing across the line in search for quick runs. The ploy worked, initially in curbing the momentum that Australia had acquired by that point, and eventually in forcing the batsmen to make mistakes in search of runs. India won the match by 172 runs but once again what stood out was Dhoni’s out of the box thinking.

During the final stages of the match, Dhoni handed over the captaincy to Sourav Ganguly who was playing in his last Test match for India. He even called up Anil Kumble, who was the original captain for the series, to collect the Border-Gavaskar trophy from the two legends themselves. In doing so, Dhoni showed that it was not just on the field that he was different, even off the cricket field, he had a few more ideas than others.

There was one thing more still left for Dhoni to achieve that year. By beating England in the second Test at Chennai, and thus winning the 2-match series 1-0, Dhoni led India to the No.1 spot in the ICC world Test rankings.

Dhoni’s next big moment came in the 2011 World Cup held in the sub-continent. India went into the tournament as one of the favorites and beat the likes of Australia and Pakistan on their way to the finals against Sri Lanka.

Just as he did in the inaugural T20 World Cup final, Dhoni raised a few eye-brows when he decided to leave out one of India’s most consistent and reliable bowlers in Ravichandran Ashwin. That Ashwin was left out in favor of Sreesanth was an even bigger surprise. But this was not the only thing that left everybody looking around for explanations.

India were asked to chase 275 to win the match and lift the World Cup. After losing Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar early, Gautam Gambhir and Virat Kohli steadied the ship for India. But when Virat Kohli fell, caught by Dilshan off his own bowling, Yuvraj Singh, who had had a dream of a tournament up until that point with runs with the bat and wickets with the ball, turning matches when they seemed out of reach, was expected to come out and see the match through along with Gautam Gambhir, who was playing a nearly flawless innings.

Instead, to everyone’s surprise, MS Dhoni walked out into the middle. Even choosing not to go by Dhoni’s lofty standards, Dhoni had had a mediocre tournament with the bat. And to bat in a final, chasing a formidable total, against a more-than-decent bowling attack, is always a challenge. But Dhoni has never been one to run away from challenges.