When Mahendra Singh Dhoni relinquished limited overs captaincy, there was a prompt and unanimous call for an encore of the early days, when he was uninhibitedly bold and not weighed down by responsibility. But the fact is that Dhoni was never a fan of playing to the gallery.
At least not after maturing as a batsman, who understood that the key to One-Day International success was intelligent batting: situation assessment, shrewd manoeuvring of the field and calculated risk taking, rather than a barrage of fours and sixes.
So, the popular theory suggesting that he might shelve virtues that made him an indomitable force was a canard, regardless of whether he remained captain or batted higher up the order. Unfortunately, those virtues are of little use in Twenty20s. The snag stood exposed in the first T20I against England, where Dhoni top scored for India but his charge was too belated to stoke India’s fortunes of lying dying embers.
The early wildness gave way to a shackled approach
The best T20 players win matches off their own accord, from seemingly forlorn situations. Individual brilliance transcends team work in this truncated format, unless the team is coherently explosive. Barring a skillset replete with power, a penchant for disregarding; almost demeaning match situations and reputations, are useful attributes to possess. It is ironic that Dhoni was the orchestrator of this revolutionary approach, when he led India to the inaugural World Twenty20 title in 2007. Fearless was a word added to the lexicon of Indian cricket thereafter, to encapsulate their performance at the event.
In years to come, however, the wild intrepidity went conspicuously missing, replaced by an inexplicably shackled approach. Undesirable results were perhaps a corollary. While India made it to another final and a semi-final in the previous two editions, Dhoni had very little to do with it in the capacity of a batsman.
His batting has continued to suffer from these pangs ever since. Most of his T20I innings have come at numbers five and six, with the strike-rate meandering between 111 and 122, like a pendulum swinging harmlessly back and forth: Tick tock, click clock, as though a symbol of strike rotation. His boundary count, too, when compared to someone like Jos Buttler, who plays a similar role for England, is starkly low.
In an overall comparison, Buttler hits a boundary every six and a half balls as opposed to Dhoni’s eight and a half. The chasm is beguilingly wide if you consider their boundary count at number five; the position Dhoni occupied in Kanpur. Dhoni takes nearly twice the number of deliveries as Buttler, who secures a boundary for his team every 4.97 balls, batting at number five. Hypothetically, since they are both slated to come into bat in the second half of an innings, if they were to face 30 balls, the eventual difference would be close to 15 runs.
In T20s, the big runs are often the difference between winning and losing
Those runs could have been crucial in Kanpur, as they would in any T20 encounter. While India’s attempts to up the ante were regularly thwarted by the loss of wickets at one end, anchoring the innings was hardly the solution. India were not even bowled out in the end, but managed only a sub-par 147.
An antithesis of that Dhoni knock was Lendl Simmons’ almighty assault on India in the semi-finals of the World Twenty20 in 2016. Along with Andre Russell, Simmons took full advantage of a Wankhede ground where the stands have a magnetic pull over the cricket ball, regardless of how it leaves the bowler’s hand. Both batsmen entered the arena in tricky situations, where the loss of another wicket, especially theirs, would have undoubtedly dashed West Indies’ hopes. India were not dissimilarly placed in Kanpur (in terms of wickets lost), only sans the pressure of a World Cup semi-final.
In the same match, Dhoni had played an admirable support act to Virat Kohli, in the final remnants of India’s innings, as they ran West Indies ragged. But, the need of the hour even then was fours and sixes, keeping in mind the opposition, dew and historic evidence, which suggested that it was near impossible to defend a score at the Wankhede stadium. India were up against equally challenging odds in Kanpur, and Dhoni was not oblivious to it.
The difference in the boundary count of the two teams in that World T20 match was 54 runs – a comprehensive margin of defeat in T20s. Dhoni was not India’s culprit on that occasion, just as he was not in Kanpur, but he was part of a larger problem that halted India’s campaign. Dhoni’s greatest strength in ODIs is a rare ability to respond appropriately to dynamic match situations, without completely altering his own game plan. He likes to take the match as deep as possible, before teeing off. A throwback to the truism; that has incidentally been his greatest weakness in T20’s, where such luxuries cannot be afforded by a batsman coming in during the second half of an innings.