When A Hoick In Time Saves Nine

Little skill. No style. But MS Dhoni’s pluck has carried him to certain greatness

Tehelka, 18 July, 2013

The legend of Mahendra Singh Dhoniis far from complete. But after the Port of Spain show, his place among the greatest of Indian sportspersons is secure forever. An unlikely feat, considering batsman Dhoni’s limited skills and hideous style. If Dhoni was a bowler and bowled as gracelessly as he bats, his fate would have been much worse than Anil Kumble’s. The leggie, at his peak, did not have a single bidder for his India shirt at a charity auction in Kolkata, a city that never tires of cricket and adores a certain Chandrashekhar. Kumble did not have that flair or an expressive run-up. He barely turned the ball. Nocricket fan ever went to the ground to see India’s highest wicket-taker bowl.

Fortunately for Dhoni, he bats. And for all the ungainly manoeuvres performed at the crease, he manages to clear the fence more often than most. That plebeian appeal of his utilitarian craft endeared him to the masses early in the career. Soon, like Kumble, Dhoni hit the chord of consistency, if only in the shorter versions of the game. Then he became the finisher. The front-stall crowd anyway loved the promise of item numbers. Imagine its delight when the shove-and-heave routine frequently came as the climactic act.

To the lovers of cricket, though, Dhoni’s diabolic use of that two-kg slab of timber remains an eyesore. Thankfully, the purists were reverse swept out of the game long before his debut. But even farmers may grudge lending the term ‘agricultural’ to describe Dhoni’s batting. In his inimitable collection of nonsense rhymes, Abol Tabol, Sukumar Roy seemingly had a premonition of that in-your-face crudity eight decades ahead of time: “The King’s old aunt (an autocrat)/Hits pumpkins with her cricketbat.”

One of cricket’s clichés is that the cherry looks like an easy-to-clobber football to batsmen gifted with great eyes. But the aesthetics of a shot do not depend on how one’s bat meets the ball. That is a fraction of a moment. What stays is the lingering follow-through or the economy of it. Dhoni’s bottom-handed game never flows. It spurts. With him, it’s never a cut but a chop. The ball is never driven but rammed. He flicks less and fetches more. He does not pull, he flails. Even his defensive shots are like rude prods.

No, not everyone is a Laxman or a Dravid. But remember Kapil Dev? Who used to bat pretty much where Dhoni comes in the order? The former India captain was probably our biggest hitter (yes, ahead of Sandeep Patil and probably CK Nayudu) of the cricketball till Dhoni (and Yuvraj Singh) came along. Batsman Dev’s trademark was the Nataraja shot, an instinctive, effortless pull played while swiveling on the right heel with the front leg drawing an arc in the air.

Compare that to the Helicopter shot Dhoni tries to dispatch full-pitched deliveries to mid-on boundaries. In 2011, the innovation inspired a Pepsi promo that sought to “change the game”; to be fair, without specifying if for better or worse. Sachin also plays a similar shot. But he does not look like an arachnophobic trying to knock himself over in an attempt to bludgeon a spider climbing up his toe. No frontline batsman who scored more than a 1,000 international runs measures up to Dhoni in laboured awkwardness.

As a finisher, Dhoni often has tailenders for company and he rarely tries to shield them. This trait has inspired inevitable comparison with Laxman, who perfected the art of instilling confidence in tail-enders to essay improbable Test partnerships time and again. For Laxman, it was a conscious decision to let a number nine or ten face a certain amount of bowling because the longer format of the game allowed him to aspire for long hauls. One cannot hide one’s partner, sacrifice scoring opportunities and still keep a staid partnership going for hours.

In the shorter format, both opportunity and target are finite. So it makes sense that the frontline batsman will take as much strike as possible to make the most of the limited number of deliveries. Also, since the overs are numbered, one needs to shield a tail-ender only for so long. Yet, as we saw in Port of Spain, Dhoni exposes the weak links for entire overs because he finds stealing singles more difficult than clearing the boundary.

This lack of finer batting skills exposes him time and again in Test cricket where few occasions call for or justify his cobbler act. It also explains why he is usually a slow starter even in the limited-overs formats and plays quite a few dot balls, preparing for the customary assault. More often than not, aware that his Rambo act may not last too long, he defers the assault till the very end of an innings or till the target is in sight.

All these are signs of a fine cricketing sense and understanding of one’s own abilities. At the same time, the strategy of leaving too much for too late is obviously risky and once prompted an ever-grumpy Gautam Gambhir to wonder at a post-match presser if the match could not have been won much earlier. But more often than not, records show that Dhoni’s luck — after all, a freak dismissal takes a single delivery — and self-belief have delivered, staking reasonable claim to cricketing greatness.

Then Port of Spain happened. Imagine it was a tennis match. At two sets all, a champion feels too drained to last the decider fifth set. He realises he cannot exhaust himself too soon. So, focussing on holding his serve, he decides he will not even try to break his opponent’s till the score reaches 5-4. Half an hour later, having virtually conceded four games, he summons all his reserve and breaks his now tired rival’s serve to take the final set 6-4. Last month’s epic semi-final at Roland Garros could have had a different result had a tiring Djokovic considered this strategy and backed himself to execute it. But few even fancy such outlandish options and such a match never happened, except at Port of Spain.

Last week, Dhoni could not protect his partners. He must have prayed hard every time a tail-ender was exposed to Malinga’s yorkers. But he did not swing hard at the next opportunity in panic. Waiting for the weak link in the Lankan bowling, he watched the asking rate climb from three to 15, and the number 11 face too many deliveries. He was lucky the game entered the last over.

Once there, Dhoni finished the match in four balls. That, as the commentators screamed, was magnificent. But that he let a final match reach that daunting stage, trusting himself to score 15 runs in the last six balls to win a tournament, is a near-spiritual triumph rarely achieved in sports. Many, like me, will continue to shudder when Dhoni slaps the air outside the off stump, hoists length deliveries or squats in defence. But we will all root for the man who has, most of all, backed himself to sporting greatness.