Nobody likes losers. So it came as no surprise when arguably the best match of the Indian Premier League was given short shrift. With 23 runs needed to win in the last over, MS Dhoni performed yet another Houdini’s act. His knock was far from convincing, and often frustrating, but helped Rising Pune Supergiants move one up from the bottom of the points table, and dump Kings XI Punjab there.
With one week go before the final, Dhoni finds himself in unfamiliar territory. He has never been eliminated from the IPL this early, and will probably follow the rest of the tournament like us, on television – or, knowing him, disconnect completely and go out to play with his favourite toys: guns and bikes.
Over the years, Dhoni has often been accused of being simply lucky. His bizarre decisions — Joginder Sharma was merely one of many unfathomable choices — on the field have often paid off. At Chennai Super Kings, his franchise assembled a galaxy of stars for him, and he led from the front.
When things went wrong as Test captain and he was on the verge of being sacked, N Srinivasan, who was the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India at the time, stood by him and vetoed a unanimous decision by the selectors. Dhoni emerged out of the whole IPL match-fixing saga in 2013 almost magically unscathed. Move over Houdini, let’s rename you Dhoni.
With Chennai suspended for two years, Dhoni’s IPL future looked bleak, albeit temporarily. After all, he had so endeared himself to the city that it only seemed a matter of time before one of the Dravidian parties offered him an election ticket. The Whistle Podu ads on TV became one of the things to watch out for even if you were not a Chennai fan.
So, everyone asked: Whom will Dhoni play for? Will it be the same again? Can you imagine Dhoni in the IPL without Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja and R Ashwin?
A new beginning
At the IPL auction earlier this year, the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group put together a team of match-winners after, predictably, making Dhoni their captain. With Steven Smith, Kevin Pietersen, Faf du Plessis and Mitchell Marsh in the ranks, along with Dhoni's (once) trusted lieutenant Ashwin and India teammate Ajinkya Rahane, Pune looked the part.
The franchise, in true Dhoni style, made a strange choice too. Pune bid Rs 4.5 crore for an unknown spinner, Murugan Ashwin. His List A and First Class record is plain ordinary (though he did well in the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy, the lesser known domestic T20 tournament), and this seemed like one of the lucky stories we hear every year.
Then, on the opening day of the tournament, Pune scored a shock win over defending champions and neighbours, Mumbai Indians. A nine-wicket victory with 39 balls to spare made everyone sit up and take notice. Dhoni, the Puneri, had arrived.
From there on began Pune's descent. They lost a few close games – the kind that frustrate you endlessly – that snatched away any semblance of momentum they would have hoped to build after the first match. They also lost almost all the marquee names in what seemed like a game of Russian Roulette. Pietersen, du Plessis, Smith and Marsh quit the tournament citing various injuries, leaving Dhoni sweating.
Dhoni was then bailed out by the strange IPL rules that allow for replacements even when teams have large squads at their disposal. They brought in George Bailey and Usman Khawaja to fill the void.
Inexplicable choices
As the tournament progressed, though, it wasn’t Pune’s misfortune that struck everyone the most. Dhoni, the captain, was a big letdown. His handling of Ashwin and Irfan Pathan has been shabby. Unlike the Delhi Daredevils' mentor Rahul Dravid, who ensured the youngsters in the team got a long rope despite repeated failures, Dhoni didn’t allow some of his players a game.
Take, for instance, Baba Aparajith and Ankush Bains, who didn’t get a game at either CSK or RPS. Of course, this can be attributed to Dhoni’s trademark style of sticking to a core group of players and not tinkering with his line-up too much.
But what about Ashwin and Pathan? Let’s start with the off-spinner first. Dhoni and Ashwin have enjoyed perhaps the most symbiotic relationship in Indian cricket. At CSK, Dhoni’s meteoric rise as captain was, in large part, a result of Ashwin’s performance with the ball. In Test matches at home, Ashwin has been India’s No. 1 bowler. On the other hand, Ashwin’s ascent as India’s lead spinner coincided with Harbhajan Singh’s waning form over the last five years.
Dhoni under-bowled Ashwin throughout this IPL season. Stephen Fleming, their coach at CSK and now RPS, defended the captain saying that the conditions haven’t necessarily suited Ashwin, and Dhoni has tried various bowling options available in the playing XI. It's true that a cursory glance at the scorecards show that the best of spinners haven’t always bowled their full quota of four overs in this edition.
So, are we reading too much into this? Maybe. But this saga actually began at the ICC World T20, when Dhoni pulled Ashwin out of the attack after two overs in the semi-final against West Indies. Ashwin was clearly far from impressed, and expressed his views in as many words.
As for Pathan, he has hardly got a game under Dhoni, both at CSK as well as RPS, provoking even Sunil Gavaskar to make a rare critical comment about a powerful cricketer. And while team selection is always a matter of intense national debate, things get tricky when you have a captain on the wane and has been previously accused of conflict of interest in selection matters.
Interestingly, an unfit RP Singh, once revealed as being managed by a sports firm Dhoni had a stake in, was a surprise entry to the IPL this year after failing to find a team in 2015. Which team picked him? Pune. Did he get a game? Yes, four of them.
So, as Dhoni and Pune bowed out of the IPL after a disappointing first season, you can't help but wonder: has he finally lost the Midas touch? Luck definitely had a part to play, but if this season was a test of adversity, Dhoni has, surprisingly, failed.
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