From a small town, thrill seeking cricketer to the
trademark calm, Mr. Cool has come a long way. Almost all modern era famous
cricketers remind you of others from the past. In Dhoni, I could see no other. There
is something about Dhoni’s sixers that advertise power.
It
was just over the weekend I had watched MS Dhoni’s biopic. I was more stirred
by the opening scene set in Wankhede Stadium during the 2011 World Cup final,
than I had been by the actual match five years earlier!! In real life, Dhoni is
one of the supreme one-day cricketers, a chillingly calm, calculating batsman
for whom a run chase is a mathematical equation. It is a game he understands
totally, in command of the nuances and strategies, capable and confident of
making difficult decisions.
In the shorter (ODI) and
shortest (T20) format of the game there is no greater genius than him. Street
smart does not even begin to describe him. He is galli smart…alley clever…bylane canny. He is the shrewdest, most ingenious
man on the ground. In fact English terms don’t do justice to his ingenuity. The
right word to describe him is Jugaado. He can drive through a
cul-de-sac & can bring democracy in China. Ok I stretched a little, but the
fact is he always has a Plan B. And
most of the times it works.
He smiles, he advises, he shows
displeasure, he communicates with umpires, but while his messages are clear, no
one could bet on what his thinking is. Dhoni is nothing if not practical. He
stumped everyone once again (first being the Test retirement) by his
announcement, preventing media speculations & BCCI’s conundrum about his
future following Virat Kohli’s successful captainship in Test.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s greatest
legacy will be his spirit of a champion, a spirit that believed in carving out
victory when defeat seemed imminent. His cool is now legendary, but has there
ever been a captain with greater situational awareness than him? I would say,
Never!!
Part of second paragraph adopted from Mike
Selvey’s column in The Guardian (Dec 20th 2014)
