Dhoni: hero from hinterland leaves behind a legacy

India’s shock defeat in the World Cup semi-finals may also mark the end of an illustrious cricket career in more ways than one.

Mahendra Singh Dhoni, now 38, tried to anchor the Indian innings, but age did seem to have caught up with him.

With many on the social media interpreting the end of India’s World Cup 2019 journey as also the end of the road for Dhoni, it makes sense to capture the transformation that Dhoni represented.

The career of Dhoni, one of India’s most successful captains, also marked a change that the game underwent more than a decade back. The game that once saw legends coming from well-to-do, urbane backgrounds – sometimes even royal families – opened itself to raw talent from the hinterland over the last decade.

Dhoni is the most visible sign of this transformation, and also the grit it brings to field performance.

The change is now much clearer, with Munaf Patel, who worked in a tile factory, Mohammad Shami, who bowled on village tracks, or Jaspreet Bumrah, who played local-level cricket, making it big, says senior cricket journalist Jaswinder Sidhu.

“There have been many others apart from Dhoni who have risen from scratch, but he does exemplify a rare and unique career. He is a natural talent and many would not believe that without sound technique, he not just survived but excelled for well over a decade,” Jaswinder Sidhu told Asiaville. “His reading of the game is also his strength, and he has been consulted on field by Kohli even after he has ceased to be captain.”

Dhoni’s cricketing grit was best noticed in 2005. The athletic wicketkeeper-batsman with long hair was promoted up the batting order against Sri Lanka, with India chasing a steep target of 300 runs. Dhoni was not too well known till then, though he had already made his international debut and also scored a century against Pakistan.

This player from Jharkhand surprised everyone by launching a brutal counter-attack against Sri Lanka. He lofted the ball repeatedly, and cleared the boundary with remarkable ease, with sheer power and timing. In all, he hit 10 sixes in that one innings, which for many brought alive Kapil Dev’s century against Zimbabwe in 1983.

The young Dhoni, a powerful striker of the ball who could hold his nerves to carry his bat when the team needed him, was visibly not sound on technique. He wasn’t a Sachin Tendulkar or Brian Lara, whose batting would seem like art. Nor was he a textbook player like Sunil Gavaskar or Rahul Dravid.

Dhoni, on the contrary, was the diligent workman who would dig his heels in and strike the ball at the last moment, using his eyesight and reflexes. And when he cut lose, he would hammer the ball all around. His helicopter shot, something that would seem impossible to any cricketer, would clear the boundary with ease.

On Wednesday, Dhoni walked into the dusk of his illustrious career, when he got run out – not being able to stretch in time to complete a second run to avoid rotating strike and exposing the batting tail – against New Zealand. His departure sealed the fate of the match and India’s World Cup 2019 dream.

Dhoni was criticised for building his innings very slowly. The hard-hitting batsman of a decade back was clearly a shadow of his former self in the twilight of his career.

Yet, Dhoni leaves behind a legacy far more powerful than what his cricketing record suggests. Yes, he was the most successful Indian captain till he led the Indian side up to a few years back, to be replaced by Virat Kohli, already a batting legend.

Dhoni’s captaincy took the Indian team forward from where Sourav Ganguly left. India had under these two captains arrived on the world stage as a top-class cricketing side, a status that evaded it over the previous decades.

Yet, Dhoni was different from both Ganguly and Kolhi. He did not display the in-your-face aggression of the other two, which critics would sometimes see as contrived, even if supporters lauded them.

Dhoni’s aggression lay in his grit; in the way he finished matches for years on end. He would on his day dominate the bowling with his powerful shots. Being tough was part of who he was, and not part of what he strategically presented himself to be in order to score the psychological advantage in a tough game.

But this style of playing was perhaps about who Dhoni was, and from where he took off.

Dhoni’s is a story of small-town India aspiring to be part of the big league. Not through cultural or social capital, but with the grit a life of struggle brings. And, of course, with some luck.

If Ganguly came from a well-known business family of Kolkata – his father Chandidas Ganguly had a flourishing printing business -- and Tendulkar was born to Marathi novelist Ramesh Tendulkar, Dhoni came from the humblest of backgrounds.

His father was a lower-level employee in a public sector undertaking in Ranchi. He played football in school and took to cricket somewhat late. In his struggling years, he even worked as a Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE) in the Indian Railways on the sports’ quota.

That manner – a rise through struggle – was visible in his cricketing journey too. The cricketer who rose from scratch through grit would also build his innings the same way. After Kapil Dev – another icon who wasn’t urbane and suave – Dhoni remains the only Indian captain till date to bring the World Cup home.

He missed the chance as India’s most experience cricketer on Wednesday. When India did win the Cup in 2011, Dhoni, not in peak form, promoted himself up the batting order, ending the match with a huge six. Cameras focused on his eyes – the picture of determination – as the ball disappeared in the floodlights.   

He walks into the twilight of his cricketing career as a cricketer who has slowed down with age. And it is perhaps time for him to hang up his boots.

Yet, the Dhoni legacy is likely to continue. The grit, the clean hits and the ability to survive, even excel, without impeccable training will mark Mahendra Singh Dhoni as a cricketer with a difference. And yet, he would remain a shining example of the democratisation of cricket, which is no longer a game dominated by those from big cities.