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