Unusual suspect

Little wonder then that Corporate India was willing to shower its millions on him in the Indian Premier League (IPL) auction this week: Six crore rupees for a 45-day tournament. It doesn’t get any bigger than this.
The story of MS Dhoni is a story of defiance in the face of the lopsided odds. He has played his cricket like he lives his life — flouting traditional norms and backing his instincts. Normal, to him, is excruciatingly boring.

Captain Courageous
In no aspect of his game does this come to the fore better than in his captaincy. The whole country may have been clamouring for experienced players in the one-day and Twenty20 teams, but Dhoni opted for youngsters because he had a feeling about them. He backed his instincts and his faith never wavered. No matter what, he said, Yuvraj Singh would continue to be in his team. And Yuvraj, after a string of failures, returned to form at the most critical time last week against Sri Lanka to prove his skipper right.

“Nobody tells you anything, you just feel it,” Dhoni says. “I back my instincts, which tell me this player has looked good and will do well. You have to stand by people. And it’s okay with me if I am harsh on people sometimes — you have to be — because I know they’re responding well to me and my decisions. We all back each other in the team and that’s important,” he says.

Consider this: He dropped Virender Sehwag from the XI and brought in Munaf Patel, going with five bowlers rather than the age-old policy of playing seven specialist bats in Australia.
He brought in Praveen Kumar in place of Sreesanth next match even when the lineup was looking settled, he got Irfan Pathan to bat at number three though Gautam Gambhir had scored a hundred in the last game, and he picked Manoj Tiwary when everybody thought Suresh Raina was the obvious choice. Why? He had a feeling.

Before that, Murali Kartik had been brought in from nowhere to play a match-winning role against Australia and Pakistan. And when Kartik was looking set to continue his international journey, Dhoni suddenly preferred Piyush Chawla.
Dhoni defied assumptions, traditional guidelines and sometimes even logic. With him at the helm, it’s foolhardy to second-guess the team, which is picked purely on intuition.

Wicket-keeping, batting, captaincy. It’s not easy to do all three things successfully because of the heavy workload. But Dhoni is unfazed. “It’s a privilege for me to take on the responsibility that comes with captaincy. To do all this at the international level is great, and I’m loving every moment.”

Bat with a bang
Alongside his growth as captain, Dhoni has also quietly improved as a batsman, surprising experts with how he has been able to slip into different roles depending on the situation.
Dhoni started with his own brand of power-hitting, coldly ignoring the manual and widening the horizons of unconventionality even in the offbeat world of one-day cricket. He then went a step further, took that style into Test cricket and succeeded there as well. “I simply believe that great players are those who take the longest time between two mistakes. I really don’t care about my technique and how I bat; for me, it’s about scoring runs and playing according to the situation,” he says.

His ability to adapt was apparent during the Lord’s Test. He saved India the match, making up for his lack of technical brilliance with guts and gumption. From the eyes of a purist, he’s perhaps the ugliest batsman in white flannels. But the modern fan doesn’t care if his back-lift comes from gully, or that he plays the straight-drive with the horizontal bat.

Slowly, reluctantly, even traditionalists had to agree that Dhoni could survive Test cricket with his natural charismatic style. But Dhoni then decided to break the pattern again by scoring a match-winning one-day fifty against the Lankans without a single boundary. His highest scores are all batting at number three, and he would ideally like to go back but he feels the time is not right just yet.

“Yuvraj wasn’t in great nick and if I had gone in at number three after Sehwag and Sachin got out early, the pressure would have come on the youngsters and that’s not fair,” he says. “They are looking to play well and earn a few matches for themselves. Once these boys get ready, I can think about going up the order.”
In his thinking, in his rise from a small town, in his batting, and in his captaincy, Dhoni doesn’t cease to amaze. India’s first national icon from Jharkhand gives an impression that — successful or not — he will continue to break the shackles of tradition before his time is over.