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MS Dhoni tribute thread
- Thread starter slippy888
- Start date
Burgey
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Dhoni had a pretty damn fine test career tbh. His batting technique was unorthodox and often got him in trouble, but it's no small thing to play as a keeping all rounder and to captain a test side. He seemed the least burdened by it of those few I've seen try to take it on.
Often his field settings were odd to me or too defensive, but as has been noted, he took India to number one.
He seems to have a completely different mental approach to cricket to his successor. For whatever faults he had, Dhoni was always a calming presence on the field. Kohli's appointment is the Indian version of KP getting the gig for England: it's all about him and will end in tears and massive blow ups.
Well played MS.
Often his field settings were odd to me or too defensive, but as has been noted, he took India to number one.
He seems to have a completely different mental approach to cricket to his successor. For whatever faults he had, Dhoni was always a calming presence on the field. Kohli's appointment is the Indian version of KP getting the gig for England: it's all about him and will end in tears and massive blow ups.
Well played MS.
harsh.ag
Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Difference is that India has the "good English coach", not Moores, and our man management is slightly better than England, if nothing else. If all else fails, Sachin would be requested to set his head straight, which he would do in a jiffy.
Riggins
International Captain
Serious?
GIMH
Norwood's on Fire
Hmmmm
silentstriker
The Wheel is Forever
Great leader of men. Took India to #1 in Tests for the first time in history.
Cabinet96
Hall of Fame Member
Indeed. I think people can be pretty hard on Dhoni sometimes. Guardian posted an article which kind of questioned whether his heart was ever in test cricket, and he's got loads of stick on here among other places. Truth it, he was a remarkably formidable test cricketer at home. Batting average of 47, with six tons. Double ton v a strong Australian attack at a time when there was genuine pessimism about India, even at home. His keeping was a good standard in Asia, he had seriously fast hands, and I'd argue he was probably better up to the stumps with a turning ball than some of the other wicketkeeper batsmen of his generation who might be considered better glovemen (Haddin, Prior for instance). And for all the questions of his captaincy he did know how to turn the screw in India pretty well. Can only recall the one series loss at home a couple of years ago in his full reign.
All of his facets were poorer overseas, but they still weren't awful. For someone having to combine three major tasks like he did for so long he was notably successful.
vic_orthdox
Global Moderator
Yup, a great quality especially considering the amount of pressure on him, and the emotion attached to the game in the nation.
GotSpin
Hall of Fame Member
Its so impressive considering India only lost because something went wrong within the team
Burgey
Request Your Custom Title Now!
Or when wronged by an umpire.
I do actually have a lot of respect for Dhoni as a cricketer, for reasons I've already stated here. As for his LO record, well he's got to be regarded as one of the greatest short form players of all time.
honestbharani
Whatever it takes!!!
harsh.ag
Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Jono
Virat Kohli (c)
Haha yeah its ridiculous that this good quality is often held against him too.
Even Kimber thinks Dhoni doesn't care when India lose in test cricket over the last few years. I mean how can you say that.
SJS
Hall of Fame Member
Its impossible to pay a genuine tribute to a sportsman (even a great one) if one is obsessed with him. Making Gods and Supermen out of our favourite cricketers is fine while we are on the ground wildly cheering our teams and our favourites but in a serious tribute at the end of a great career going overboard with hype does great dis-service to the cricketer concerned and does little for the credibility of the person espousing his superhuman status. Dhoni has enough to commend his great career and by going overboard we risk scepticism and open up our comments to ridicule.
Jono
Virat Kohli (c)
SJS
Hall of Fame Member
Dhoni has too many roles to be rated overall as a package. To do justice to this very remarkable cricketer one has to speak of each of his roles separately.
WICKETKEEPER : Dhoni became a wicketkeeper in an era when specialist wicket keepers were almost gone. Yet some countries, Australia in particular and England and South Africa after them, continued to produce some really top notch wicket keepers who would have been rated pretty highly in most eras. The last great wicket-keeper (on keeping abilities alone) has to be Haely but in Gilchrist Australia produced a great aggressive batsman who kept wickets in style and would be rated high on keeping abilities alone.
In such a time, Dhoni, in my humble opinion, was way below the top wicket keepers of even this age of a batsman keeper. It is very clear that is some of his deputies on test tours had the same batting abilities as him (or he as them) he would not have remained India's first choice keeper with this modest glove work. It basically came from a poor technique as a keeper. Fortunately for him his batting (and later his captaincy) bailed him out. If he had batted in the top four, I suspect even as captain, he would have yielded the gloves to a better keeper.
On his keeping technique, let me be more specific. He did not have the soft hands that give (as for the slips) as you collect the ball. He collected with hard hands which can and does make the ball pop out. You could also see it at times as he collected throws from the deep.
Even more importantly, he did not stay down and then rise with the ball as it rose after pitching. This is meant to keep your hands at the same height as the ball till it is nicked. This is very important while standing up because the ball after the nick moves just a little and you have the best chance of catching it if your hands were in line at the point of the snick. He was very poor in this the most important aspect of keeping.
The problem with assessing keepers is that we tend to go by number of dismissals. This is not the best way to test how good they are as glovemen. You can tell the better keeper between two in the same match even if neither has a dismissal to his credit. You just need to watch how they move and how they collect and where their gloves are when a batsman plays the ball. Unfortunately only keepers do that.
BATTING : Dhoni not only came from a small town and a low-income household, he was also, quite obviously untutored/coached as a batsman. This was obvious right through his career. However, it is this aspect put alongside his performances with the bat in all kinds of situations, mostly under duress, that make him an extraordinarily remarkable batsman. I have always wondered what a player Dhoni would have been had he the benefit of a top coach of Bombay or Karnataka. Most of us have, at least early in his career, been guilty of being amused by his 'home-made' batting technique and shots. Dhoni's was great not inspite of but because of his being unschooled. His transformation from the run a ball batsman to the irritatingly slow one at the start of his innings was something that was to be admired. We admire Sachin for eschewing his cover drive during that double century in Australia. Imagine playing a game entirely alien to your natural inclination. His lack of technique did show him up on some surfaces but I can not imagine any other cricketer with Dhoni's background to have emerged as the batsman that he did.
I think his batting, when put alongside his completely unschooled start, is Dhoni's greatest attribute.The format, the limitations on bowling, the fields were all aspects that made Dhoni the master of all he surveyed when at the crease in the limited overs game. It also made him a master at assessing the game. There have been very few batsmen to judge the match situation than Dhoni does in the shorter format. This is where he really shone.
His batting in Test cricket was laboured and showed his deficiencies more often than the shorter format where he was king.
CAPTAIN : It is difficult to assess captains against captains at times. You have captains like Brearley who were masters on the field and moved their bowlers and fielders around with great skill and instinctive wisdom. Then there are those like Worrell who took a group of talented black cricketers who did not think they were as good as the best in the world and made them believe they were . . . and he did so with a grace and dignity (besides cricketing wisdom) which put him at par with the best of his contemporaries. In India we have had different captains who performed different roles and are very highly rated as skippers. Pataudi who performed a Worrell kind of role on a team less gifted than the West Indies and Ganguly who took a team of individuals young and old and led them with aplomb. Dhoni, was a bit of a surprise when Kumble suggested his name to take over the Test captaincy but so far had the youngster, with the unruly red-hay kind of hair, come that he took it as if he was born to do it. He was not a technically brilliant captain but he was an instinctive one - a purely on-the-moment-decision kind of guy . . . a punter of sorts but when it keeps working for so long calling him a punter is less than complimentary. Dhoni was more than that but his strengths were not on the technical side but on his attitude to the game which showed in his leadership. He never ever thought himself (and his team) to be second to anyone. Ganguly was like that too but Dhoni took it to another level with his quiet and confident demeanour. He did not make faces or say strong words to his opponents. He just smiled in a confident knowing way and since his record kept improving over time, one somehow felt comfortable with Dhoni at the helm. Even when things started slipping post the 2011 World Cup in the Test arena, one somehow felt (most of India did) that we would pull things back. This was not to be and this has to do not just with Dhoni's captaincy but with other things that were happening at the same time.
To understand this we need to first talk of his captaincy as a limited overs captain. Dhoni as a captain in the limited overs game was a different cup of tea. Not because he was a different captain but because it was a different game and it suited him very well. To start with he was a far superior batsman whose game floored in this format. Secondly he was able to judge the game situation far better in the shorter format (as mentioned above with his batting) which made him as a batsman such a leader of run chases. His captaincy really seemed to stand out due to the tremendous role he played with the bat in so many extraordinary run chases. Eventually it seemed to make him a better captain. Moreover, the less complex nature of the shorter format (runs versus run-in 50 overs each as against runs and 20 wickets versus runs and twenty wicket over five days) made the technical aspect of captaincy less important. This comes up while the side is in the field and bowlers, handling them, setting fields, according to batsmen, match situations, conditions etc. In the limited overs game it has relatively less of an impact.
Before someone stands up and questions this analysis of Dhoni being a natural leader in the limited format and limited in the longer version - let me give my view on why I think so inspire of his taking us to the Test number 1 spot.
There is a truism that a captain can not bat or bowl for his team mates - or that a captain, at the end of the day, is only as good as his players. It is true. A better captain will get the best out of his players but if the substance he has to work with is not great, he can do only so much.
Dhoni inherited a great side with a top order in the batting that were the envy of the world. The bowling side was a good mix of young and old and along with the terrific batting side we were good enough to be the side to beat in all formats. Then suddenly the Sehwags, Dravids, Laxmans, were gone. So were the bowlers. The Kumble just before he became captain and then Zaheer and Harbhajan. The young batsmen who were to replace the seniors were good enough for the shorter version and inexperienced but more than a decent lot in home conditions with the bat. However in the longer version and outside the country the young new batting side was exposed and the bowling side was put to the sword. Suddenly the general had all his armoury taken away. Dhoni had not yet led a weak side. He seemed a bit lost. Any decisions that he took, instinctive as before, seemed to backfire. Short pitched bowling which worked last time failed now.
This period coincided with the great turmoil in Indian cricket with match fixing allegation which finally reached the doors of the team he led, the BCCI president who owned the team and for whose company Dhoni worked as a Vice President. Rumours about Dhoni's name being somewhere amongst the papers with the courts started doing the circles of the media. Dhoni started facing non-cricketing questions in his conferences. His support for certain players, lauded till now, started to be questioned.
It is debatable how much even a stoic and confident character like Dhoni was affected by this. The bottom line is that his away record in Test matches which looked like just a minor blip was now getting worse as was the Test teams performance. Dhoni who could do nothing wrong as keeper, batsman and captain was now being looked at critically. Typical of India but this is natural for a country and a people that raise you to demigod status when it is not deserved.
to be continued . . .
WICKETKEEPER : Dhoni became a wicketkeeper in an era when specialist wicket keepers were almost gone. Yet some countries, Australia in particular and England and South Africa after them, continued to produce some really top notch wicket keepers who would have been rated pretty highly in most eras. The last great wicket-keeper (on keeping abilities alone) has to be Haely but in Gilchrist Australia produced a great aggressive batsman who kept wickets in style and would be rated high on keeping abilities alone.
In such a time, Dhoni, in my humble opinion, was way below the top wicket keepers of even this age of a batsman keeper. It is very clear that is some of his deputies on test tours had the same batting abilities as him (or he as them) he would not have remained India's first choice keeper with this modest glove work. It basically came from a poor technique as a keeper. Fortunately for him his batting (and later his captaincy) bailed him out. If he had batted in the top four, I suspect even as captain, he would have yielded the gloves to a better keeper.
On his keeping technique, let me be more specific. He did not have the soft hands that give (as for the slips) as you collect the ball. He collected with hard hands which can and does make the ball pop out. You could also see it at times as he collected throws from the deep.
Even more importantly, he did not stay down and then rise with the ball as it rose after pitching. This is meant to keep your hands at the same height as the ball till it is nicked. This is very important while standing up because the ball after the nick moves just a little and you have the best chance of catching it if your hands were in line at the point of the snick. He was very poor in this the most important aspect of keeping.
The problem with assessing keepers is that we tend to go by number of dismissals. This is not the best way to test how good they are as glovemen. You can tell the better keeper between two in the same match even if neither has a dismissal to his credit. You just need to watch how they move and how they collect and where their gloves are when a batsman plays the ball. Unfortunately only keepers do that.
BATTING : Dhoni not only came from a small town and a low-income household, he was also, quite obviously untutored/coached as a batsman. This was obvious right through his career. However, it is this aspect put alongside his performances with the bat in all kinds of situations, mostly under duress, that make him an extraordinarily remarkable batsman. I have always wondered what a player Dhoni would have been had he the benefit of a top coach of Bombay or Karnataka. Most of us have, at least early in his career, been guilty of being amused by his 'home-made' batting technique and shots. Dhoni's was great not inspite of but because of his being unschooled. His transformation from the run a ball batsman to the irritatingly slow one at the start of his innings was something that was to be admired. We admire Sachin for eschewing his cover drive during that double century in Australia. Imagine playing a game entirely alien to your natural inclination. His lack of technique did show him up on some surfaces but I can not imagine any other cricketer with Dhoni's background to have emerged as the batsman that he did.
I think his batting, when put alongside his completely unschooled start, is Dhoni's greatest attribute.The format, the limitations on bowling, the fields were all aspects that made Dhoni the master of all he surveyed when at the crease in the limited overs game. It also made him a master at assessing the game. There have been very few batsmen to judge the match situation than Dhoni does in the shorter format. This is where he really shone.
His batting in Test cricket was laboured and showed his deficiencies more often than the shorter format where he was king.
CAPTAIN : It is difficult to assess captains against captains at times. You have captains like Brearley who were masters on the field and moved their bowlers and fielders around with great skill and instinctive wisdom. Then there are those like Worrell who took a group of talented black cricketers who did not think they were as good as the best in the world and made them believe they were . . . and he did so with a grace and dignity (besides cricketing wisdom) which put him at par with the best of his contemporaries. In India we have had different captains who performed different roles and are very highly rated as skippers. Pataudi who performed a Worrell kind of role on a team less gifted than the West Indies and Ganguly who took a team of individuals young and old and led them with aplomb. Dhoni, was a bit of a surprise when Kumble suggested his name to take over the Test captaincy but so far had the youngster, with the unruly red-hay kind of hair, come that he took it as if he was born to do it. He was not a technically brilliant captain but he was an instinctive one - a purely on-the-moment-decision kind of guy . . . a punter of sorts but when it keeps working for so long calling him a punter is less than complimentary. Dhoni was more than that but his strengths were not on the technical side but on his attitude to the game which showed in his leadership. He never ever thought himself (and his team) to be second to anyone. Ganguly was like that too but Dhoni took it to another level with his quiet and confident demeanour. He did not make faces or say strong words to his opponents. He just smiled in a confident knowing way and since his record kept improving over time, one somehow felt comfortable with Dhoni at the helm. Even when things started slipping post the 2011 World Cup in the Test arena, one somehow felt (most of India did) that we would pull things back. This was not to be and this has to do not just with Dhoni's captaincy but with other things that were happening at the same time.
To understand this we need to first talk of his captaincy as a limited overs captain. Dhoni as a captain in the limited overs game was a different cup of tea. Not because he was a different captain but because it was a different game and it suited him very well. To start with he was a far superior batsman whose game floored in this format. Secondly he was able to judge the game situation far better in the shorter format (as mentioned above with his batting) which made him as a batsman such a leader of run chases. His captaincy really seemed to stand out due to the tremendous role he played with the bat in so many extraordinary run chases. Eventually it seemed to make him a better captain. Moreover, the less complex nature of the shorter format (runs versus run-in 50 overs each as against runs and 20 wickets versus runs and twenty wicket over five days) made the technical aspect of captaincy less important. This comes up while the side is in the field and bowlers, handling them, setting fields, according to batsmen, match situations, conditions etc. In the limited overs game it has relatively less of an impact.
Before someone stands up and questions this analysis of Dhoni being a natural leader in the limited format and limited in the longer version - let me give my view on why I think so inspire of his taking us to the Test number 1 spot.
There is a truism that a captain can not bat or bowl for his team mates - or that a captain, at the end of the day, is only as good as his players. It is true. A better captain will get the best out of his players but if the substance he has to work with is not great, he can do only so much.
Dhoni inherited a great side with a top order in the batting that were the envy of the world. The bowling side was a good mix of young and old and along with the terrific batting side we were good enough to be the side to beat in all formats. Then suddenly the Sehwags, Dravids, Laxmans, were gone. So were the bowlers. The Kumble just before he became captain and then Zaheer and Harbhajan. The young batsmen who were to replace the seniors were good enough for the shorter version and inexperienced but more than a decent lot in home conditions with the bat. However in the longer version and outside the country the young new batting side was exposed and the bowling side was put to the sword. Suddenly the general had all his armoury taken away. Dhoni had not yet led a weak side. He seemed a bit lost. Any decisions that he took, instinctive as before, seemed to backfire. Short pitched bowling which worked last time failed now.
This period coincided with the great turmoil in Indian cricket with match fixing allegation which finally reached the doors of the team he led, the BCCI president who owned the team and for whose company Dhoni worked as a Vice President. Rumours about Dhoni's name being somewhere amongst the papers with the courts started doing the circles of the media. Dhoni started facing non-cricketing questions in his conferences. His support for certain players, lauded till now, started to be questioned.
It is debatable how much even a stoic and confident character like Dhoni was affected by this. The bottom line is that his away record in Test matches which looked like just a minor blip was now getting worse as was the Test teams performance. Dhoni who could do nothing wrong as keeper, batsman and captain was now being looked at critically. Typical of India but this is natural for a country and a people that raise you to demigod status when it is not deserved.
to be continued . . .