Captain MS Dhoni gets his priority right: Nation first before Sachin Tendulkar

Contrary to all expectations MS Dhoni had elected to bowl first in Sachin Tendulkar’s final Test at Mumbai. Abhishek Mukherjee makes an attempt to fathom the psychology of the Indian captain.

November 14, 2013. Mumbai was at her best to bid their son farewell. The crowds had not exactly filled in, but a lot of them were glued in to their television sets and internet browsers with a stomach pain or an ill grandmother excuse ready in case. “Just win the toss,” was what they prayed.
 
MS Dhoni tossed the coin, Darren Sammy called — wrongly. The microphone moved on to Dhoni. The spectators — and millions of viewers — cheered expectantly. Sachin Tendulkar would get to bat twice in his farewell Test! Wasn’t that what they had wanted?
 
Dhoni elected to bowl instead. The fans could not believe their ears: why would someone opt to bowl? Does he not have a sense of the occasion?
 
Let us not forget here that Dhoni is never one to not to pay homage to the long-timers; Anil Kumble, after his sudden retirement at Feroz Shah Kotla in 2008, was given a guard of honour inside the dressing-room, and when Dhoni was asked to lift the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, he had called Kumble to the podium at Nagpur to share the trophy with him. Note that India had won the four-match Test series 2-0 against Australia; both Tests were won under Dhoni, while Kumble had led India to two draws.
 
At Nagpur, Dhoni was equally magnanimous about his first international captain as well. Sourav Ganguly, who had announced his retirement before the series, was given a guard of honour as well. With Australia on 190 for eight chasing 382, Dhoni had even asked Ganguly to lead India.



In Tendulkar’s last Test, Dhoni preferred to remain in the background throughout the Test; he reached the 250-victim mark, but that passed almost as silently as Ravichandran Ashwin being the fastest Indian to reach a hundred Test wicket or what was probably Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s last Test on Indian soil (we sincerely hope, though, that we get to see more of him in this part of the world).
 
However, he had handed over the cap and had arranged the guard of honour for Tendulkar, and was the first [along with Virat Kohli] to lift him on his shoulders. He did not really get a scope to do it for Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, but it is evident that he does have a sense for the occasion.
 
Why the decision to bowl first, then? Why the willingness to extend India’s last-wicket partnership (despite the entire world wanting otherwise and the knowledge that West Indies were very unlikely to win the Test from there)? Why this stark difference in attitude?
 
Let us try to understand Dhoni first. Born in 1982, Dhoni had idolised one or more of these men over the years. They have been his heroes and he must have been a proud man to have played alongside all of them, let alone leading them [barring Kumble].
 
Tendulkar, of course, was the most coveted hero when Dhoni grew up. It would have made perfect sense had he batted first to please himself, Tendulkar, and fans all over the world. But he was not going to do that, no.
 
He had West Indies down there, at the edge of the cliff. He was not going to get carried away by the grandeur of the occasion and let them a way to claw back into existence. He would be pushing them on and on with unyielding ruthlessness until their fingers slipped and they fell inside that bottomless chasm of a humiliating series defeat.
 
“We will focus on the match,” he had said before the Test. He was serious when he had said that.
 
What if Tino Best and his mates got the ball doing a bit on the first morning of the Test (the judgement was correct, for we saw how well Bhuvneshwar Kumar bowled — albeit without luck — on Day One)? What if India were suddenly 50 for four (they were 83 for five at Kolkata) before lunch?
 
What if Chris Gayle and Chanderpaul erased a 200-odd deficit and asked India to chase 200-odd against Shane Shillingford? Why not ask Rohit Sharma to stretch the lead to as much as possible instead of going for wild slogs after Mohammad Shami walked out?
 
In other words, why take the minimum risk?
 
Dhoni’s ruthlessness
 
This was Tendulkar’s 200th and final Test — but more importantly, this was a Test in which India had been playing. Dhoni, despite having admitted to the fact that he was a Tendulkar fan himself, did not allow himself to get carried away by the occasion. Yes, he would pay tribute to the great man — but not at the cost of putting his side at the slightest risk.
 
The attitude, which has been perhaps the greatest criticism about Dhoni, is all about the absolute hatred to lose a match. Seldom has he displayed his emotions on the field, but it must not be assumed that he had been less hungry to win than any other captain in the world. And he would not, in the end, be willing to lose a Test at any cost — even if it meant that Tendulkar would not have the chance to bat twice in his swansong Test.

Douglas Jardine
 
Ruthlessness is certainly not a new concept in the world of cricket. Douglas Jardine had famously announced, “I’ve not travelled 6,000 miles to make friends. I'm here to win the Ashes” during the Bodyline series. He had absolutely no mercy for the Australians on that tour, and neither did he care for international relationships.
 
Jardine was not willing to spare his colleagues either. He had insisted Eddie Paynter bat, despite the batsman suffering from acute tonsillitis in the extreme heat of Brisbane (“What about those fellows [Lord Roberts’ men] who marched to Kandahar with fever on them?”); and when Harold Larwood had broken down with an injured foot, he had insisted Larwood stayed on the field at mid-off till Don Bradman had been dismissed.

Don Bradman

Don Bradman was not much different himself. His single-minded attitude to grind every opposition — even in lesser matches — on the 1948 tour has been famously documented. However, a greater example can be cited from the 1946-47 Ashes. When cricket had eventually resumed between the two sides with the unofficial ‘Victory Tests’, cricket was played in a mood as merry as it has ever been played in.
 
When the sides met for the Ashes — the first since War — in 1946-47, Wally Hammond and his men had possibly expected a ‘Goodwill’ series. Several Australians (Keith Miller and Lindsay Hassett being the most prominent among them) were of the same intention as well.
 
Bradman had thought otherwise. After a dodgy start, he edged one from Bill Voce to Jack Ikin high at second slip. It was so obvious a catch that nobody had even bothered to appeal: Bradman, however, refused to walk. The appeal was so belated that the umpires were probably confused, conferred, and had decided to give him not out.
 
The ‘Goodwill’ part of the series had gone out of the window before lunch on Day One. Bradman was not out there to have fun or to welcome the English after the War. Neither was he in any mood to celebrate the resumption of cricket. For him, Ashes meant victory, and nothing would prevent him from doing that.

Others
 
Wally Hammond was no exception, either. Over eight years back, he had decided to bat on at The Oval till England had amassed 903 for seven. He did not care about the spectators or the cricket; he had simply wanted to win the Test. And win he did.
 
There was another genre as well. After going up in the third Ashes Test at Headingley, Simpson had decided to go on the defensive: as a result he himself batted on for 762 minutes in the next Test at Old Trafford, scoring 311 and not declaring till well into the third.
 
Sunil Gavaskar did an encore in the 1980-81 series against England at home. After winning the first Test at Bombay, he simply shut shop, and led India to five more Tests in the series which produced some of the dullest cricket the world has ever seen.
 
There have been men who have hated losing, and were the last to allow anyone or anything stop them — even their own emotions — from achieving that. They did not care about international relationships or low quality of cricket. They had simply wanted to win.
 
Of course, not all captains have had equal resources and different results to show. But these parameters have hardly defined their attitude. Irrespective of merit and results, the mindset has always peeked through their actions on the field.
 
Dhoni is just another of them — with an endless, indomitable hunger for victory burning inside him forever. He might have been an Australian in another life.

(Abhishek Mukherjee is a cricket historian and Senior Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He generally looks upon life as a journey involving two components – cricket and literature – though not as disjoint elements. A passionate follower of the history of the sport with an insatiable appetite for trivia and anecdotes, he has also a steady love affair with the incredible assortment of numbers that cricket has to offer. He also thinks he can bowl decent leg-breaks in street cricket, and blogs at http://ovshake.blogspot.in. He can be followed on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ovshake42)