From Captain Cool to Captain Cranky, M S Dhoni is running out of the luck that once favoured him.
A hallmark of Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s two years as the captain of the Indian cricket team, in some format or the other, has been his knack of coming up with surprise moves that produce the right results. His bowling changes, shuffling of the batting order, et cetra, have more often than not borne the desired fruit. This has happened often enough even in the Indian Premier League.
Due to this knack, some have called him brilliant, some have praised his instincts. But most often he has been called a lucky captain.
By the look of things, though, Dhoni could be running out of luck, and the reference here is not to the manner in which his defence of 153 against the West Indies unravelled under Bravo’s late onslaught on Friday night. Dhoni did look clueless. One cannot always turn to Harbhajan and expect him to do miracles. He did perform one of those by bowling a maiden over to Gayle under fielding restrictions, Dhoni needed to find another solution to the Bravo problem and he could not.
But where Dhoni has looked truly out of sorts is in his new battle with the media. It’s a losing battle from the beginning. After all, some part of the Dhoni persona — identified by that atrocious epithet of Captain Cool — is the media’s creation (helped by commercials that show him running with Bipasha Basu). He is now being seen as Captain Cranky as he refuses to answer questions at press conferences about Sehwag’s injuries and tells journalists to wait for BCCI’s press release.
It’s such a far cry from the way he was looked upon earlier: full of candid earthiness and unafraid. Now he rounds up his entire team for a show of solidarity in response to one news report that there is a rift between him and Sehwag.
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Captain Cool needs to understand a fundamental rule in handling the media: Thou shalt never be perceived as trying too hard. If you are always available, you will be derided as a “dial-a-quote” who has no work. If you are too distanced, they will get you some day, most probably when you are down. If you are always striking out your own path, away from the group and breaking convention, you will become Lord Snooty. If you go out of your way to show solidarity, they will see cracks.
The second thing — to invoke Ellsworth Toohey from The Fountainhead — is that the one thing everyone loves more than a hero is a fallen hero. Once you have been universally established as a superstar, you stop serving the basic purpose of providing a juicy copy. That will come from your fall.