WHAT MS DHONI CAN LEARN FROM MITHALI RAJ
Earlier this week, after having helped her team beat Pakistan in the ICC World T20, India women’s cricket legend, Mithali Raj, spoke about how this tournament may be her last in the shortest format of the game.
“…When you also think that the team has gone through a lot of transition, and there are a lot of youngsters in the side, so at some point, [thinking about] more than myself, whether I would be able to give the best or not.
“There are times when I think about the team, whether it is the right time to move on, and I believe that now the team is settling, so it could be the last World Cup for me, [in] the WT20 format.”
In the men’s version of the game, another legend — who also happens to be a former captain in all three formats and is a World Cup winner in both ODIs and T20s — is hanging on to his place in the team with his finger nails. MS Dhoni is having not too good a time of it on the field. But with both his captain, Virat Kohli, and his coach, Ravi Shastri, continuing to champion his importance to the current limited overs side (Dhoni retired from Test cricket in 2014), who dares dislodge him?
The T20 revolution has changed the 50-overs format for ever. Teams now accelerate not merely at the end of an innings, but from the middle overs. The middle order (in to which Dhoni fits) is required to score more, faster, and earlier and earlier on in the innings. Dhoni’s game has not changed to accommodate this. He is a player stuck in time; the evolution in the game has passed him by.
Since October 2017, only Sri Lanka’s middle order (Numbers 4 to 7) has scored fewer runs per over than India’s 4.82, an analysis by Freddie Wilde of CricViz in this newspaper showed. Dhoni contributes a great deal to this slowing down. Since the 2015 World Cup, Dhoni has scored at 4.11 runs per over in the middle overs, compared to the rest of the team’s 5.52 in the same phase. Since the 2017 Champions Trophy, Dhoni’s run rate dips further to 3.65. Other teams have sussed out Dhoni’s weakness against spin. Since the 2015 World Cup, Dhoni has failed to score against 56% of the balls he has faced from spinners.
Yet here is Dhoni, living in his self created, self sustaining bubble of certitude and denial, telling anyone who will care to listen that there is not a thing wrong with his game. This is not so much Dhoni raging against the dying of the light as Dhoni raging against anyone who dares to suggest that his light is dying.
There is a tragic grandeur about a sporting great trying, even for a moment, or a brief spell, or the course of a single match, to recapture the waning magic. The feint and shimmy of an Andres Iniesta who is aware that he is playing his last football World Cup; the drive and single mindedness of a diminished Pete Sampras who knows he has it in him to win that one last major before he departs the big stage; Steve Waugh in his final Test, grinding out a draw and saving a series for his country. It is tragic to see them trying so hard to recreate what used to come so easily. But it is grand because of the fragility of the effort — and the acknowledgement and realisation in those sportsmen that greatness has its limits; that the body will no longer take them where their minds want to go; and that they are now left with only the embers of what once was a blaze of genius.
Hubris allows for no such contradictions or complexity. Indian male cricketers seem not to be haunted by the feeling of being at a crossroads, with the way forward appearing to be all downhill. They, and only they, will decide when to stop playing. Not time, not the selectors, not the merit of the competition for their places in the side. It is a reaffirmation of how the cult of the personal triumphs over that of the collective; how celebrity and self absorption every time trump what may be good for the team.
Which is why it was such a delight to hear Raj speak so eloquently about her future, to know that she was turning over in her own mind whether it was fair on up-and-coming talent — and the team she has led with such distinction — for her to carry on.
In this regard, Indian women’s cricket is still a sort of reflection of an idealised, romanticised notion of the game. A scenario in which money, endorsements, commercialisation, boorishness, vanity and the power of one do not outweigh the good for all.