MS Dhoni, and that six over long on.
August 15, 2020
On December 30, 2014, MS Dhoni played one of the more insignificant innings of his career.
At the Melbourne Cricket Ground, he came in with India five down for 141. He hung around a little more than an hour for 24 not out, and navigated India to the safety of a draw. The result confirmed his second failure to win a Test series in Australia as captain. Shaking hands at the end of the match, you could see the pilot light go out in his eyes.
Shortly after, quietly and with the minimum of fuss, Dhoni terminated his Test career.
In hindsight, it’s hard not to read into that moment what we know now. As well as we knew then how desperately he wanted to crack Australia, we know now that he wasn’t happy. We certainly know now that he was being driven to breaking point by the demands of Test cricket. That’s what made it out of the ordinary; he could have gone on but decided not to. Indian cricketers don’t often do that. And even in that sudden, silent parting, Dhoni was making a point loud and clear: he no longer wanted any part of what a traditionalist Indian setup considers the highest form of the game.
For a man who seemed capable of bending fate to his own desires at his peak, Dhoni seemed to have an innate understanding that there are few storybook endings in cricket.
That first retirement ushered in the curious era of the Dhoni twilight. Now, in the cold light of his more permanent international retirement, it might be time for a confession. Dhoni’s stint as senior statesman has been successful but not exactly glorious. In recent years especially, in a telltale sign of decline, we’ve seen Dhoni start to appear gun-shy. This is natural with ageing athletes, of course. With Dhoni, though, it was something else. His pure ability hadn’t eroded, but what got him was the sedimentation of years of risk-aversion that made the ability harder to unlock. We’d hold our breath waiting for a classic Dhoni batting assault.
It wouldn’t come.
That became clear in the 2019 World Cup semi-final defeat to New Zealand, destined now to be his final appearance for India. It was a classic Dhoni match, in many ways: a hopeless cause, a growing feeling that it might not be so hopeless after all, the thrill of watching hope morph into expectation. Momentum shifted, tension mounted. In the end, though, India’s loss was sealed, in large part, by Dhoni’s inability to start swinging punches until it was too late. That his last act in international cricket was to be run-out — undefeated by a bowler but dismissed all the same — felt like a definitive loss of choice.
The writing was on the wall. It was time to go.
That he has pulled the trigger now, during a cricketing lull, feels like a characteristically sensible thing to do. That sensibility has been one of his great gifts to Indian cricket; a keen sense of timing that transcends the moment itself and informs his best decisions.
The signature moment from Dhoni’s career, the 2011 World Cup win in Mumbai, demonstrated this in spades. The winning moment, the huge stroke, the twirling bat, the steady face, the confidence that it has gone for six, was all about Dhoni. The celebration that followed, however, was all about Sachin, Yuvraj, Harbhajan, Kohli, and everyone else in the team.
Except Dhoni.
In itself, this reveals something remarkable about Dhoni’s mind.
He had a few minutes at most to recognize that India were going to win, remove himself completely from the situation, set aside his own torturous journey to get to that point as no more than an irrelevant factor in the problem, think of the broader consequences of ending his country’s twenty-eight year wait for a World Cup, map out the correct course of action, and then act with purpose.
Sensibility is a poor word for that kind of awareness. Perhaps Dhoniness is a better one.
That 2011 World Cup final was incomparable, of course, but there were forty-six other occasions where Dhoni was unbeaten in a winning one-day chase. (All told, he averaged 102.71 in winning one-day chases, a fact which still feels like an elaborate prank.) The deeper you dig into Dhoni’s numbers, the less they make sense. Their only role, really, is to add some colour in the middle of the fatigue that often accompanies records-based assessments of cricket careers.
With Dhoni in particular, this assessment is somewhat self-defeating because of the trophies he won. Indeed, Dhoni is uniquely placed to expose records for what they really are: numbers carefully curated to win arguments that are altogether meaningless because his numbers were in service of a winning legacy that was never really in doubt.
This winning legacy has permitted him access to something else.
He has developed a universality; he is his own social shorthand. Dhoni is an aspiration, an inspiration, a mood, an attitude, a manner of speaking, a style of leadership, a branch of intuition, a school of wizardry, a wicketkeeping field office, a power hitting back office, a brand of tactics, and much, much more. Whether you knew little about the sport or you could recite all his statistics backwards, an opinion on Dhoni was, for several years, the likeliest point of entry into a conversation on Indian cricket.
Over this time, he has run the gamut of public opinion. He has been the subject of adulation and the target of ire like any other cricketing celebrity. However, he has had to deal with the pressures of putting world titles on the table for a team that really didn’t win all that much before he became captain. As a result, Dhoni has unquestionably been the victim, more than anyone before him, of his own success. To millions invested in his story, whether their loyalties lay with India or not, Dhoni in India blue was appointment viewing until the very end.
The way the circle of cricket runs, we will, in time, probably replace that feeling with someone else. It’d take a brave person, though, to claim that with certainty.
As that wait stretches out before us, it’s only right to think back to what he has given: the trove of memories, the calmness in heartbreak, that six over long on, that winning feeling.
Thank you, MS, for making cricket come alive for an entire generation.
