If you go from being a ticket collector at a nondescript West Bengal railway station at 20 to the world’s highest-earning cricketer before your 30th birthday, it is easy to lose your head. Mahendra Singh Dhoni hasn’t.
Faced with a question like that, most other cricketers would have gone into a laboured detailing of the next goals, which would have made little sense to anyone. Cricketers like to stick to clichés. A bowler bowls well because he “puts the ball in the right areas”. Good batsmen take it “one over at a time”. Good captains, if batting first, like to “put runs on the board and put the opposition under pressure”. Those not performing “need to apply themselves”. And if a team wins, it is because “the boys played well”.
Dhoni is different. As he said, his first thoughts after hitting the winning six in the World Cup final, even as he twirled the bat in his left hand, were to grab a stump before they were all gone. The hugging, he said, could wait. And he was glad that the team won. Otherwise, everyone would be questioning why he played Sreesanth instead of Ashwin and promoted himself in the batting order, despite his run of poor scores, above Yuvraj Singh, the team’s talisman.
He did not mourn for Gambhir, who narrowly missed a century in the final; he said Gambhir had himself to blame for it. Earlier in the tournament, his advice to Sreesanth was that if he wanted to irritate someone it should be a member of the opposition and not one of his own team.
The responses have been consistent for a while. After beating Australia in the inaugural T20 semi-final, the king of cliché, Ravi Shastri (“all three results are possible at this point”, “this will go all the way”, “this match, one gets the feeling, will go down to the wire”) accosted him for his immediate reaction. Dhoni said he was happy that the team had proved Shastri wrong, who had predicted a win for Australia. Despite his stock of phrases, Shastri was at a loss for words.
In the afterglow of the World Cup win, experts — all of them former players — say Dhoni made all the difference. Imran Khan, Allan Border and Vivian Richards did that on CNN-IBN. On a fortnightly talk show on ESPN Cricinfo, Ian Chappell said the big thing India had was that Dhoni was captain. Sanjay Manjrekar said the Indian batting had been great earlier, too, such as in the 2003 World Cup, but this time the batting order had the temperament of the captain, which is what worked. In fact, Manjrekar, every time he talks about Dhoni, tells himself not to get carried away. You may debate whether he does, but you would lose the debate if you said Dhoni does.
This ability to keep his head has helped him manage a side which, in various formats, had Saurav Ganguly, who got Dhoni into the Indian team, Rahul Dravid, who quit captaincy for reasons as yet unexplained, Laxman, who nurses a grudge at not being picked for the limited-overs formats, Sehwag, who has had captaincy ambitions of his own, Yuvraj Singh, another one who could be captain if Dhoni was not around (the two, according to tabloids, also wanted the same girl), and Sachin Tendulkar, who has hailed Dhoni as the best captain he has played under.
A colleague said the other day that Dhoni would do well as the head of a coalition government. It’s not an isolated sentiment. At the press conference after the final, Dhoni was asked to react to the sentiment that he should try to run the country. Dhoni giggled, dissolving six weeks of a twisted frown, saying he could not remember the first part of the long question.