Will Sania and Dhoni leap big?

Ranjona Banerji

MUMBAI: Watching Sania Mirza play can be an amazingly frustrating experience. She plays three brilliant shots and then makes the stupidest mistake ever. In that order. Work it out.

Three brilliant shots at love, 15 and 30 are wonderful to watch but will not win you matches. Your most brilliant shot has to be up 40. Or up an advantage. Or down an advantage.

The biggest frustration is that Mirza has it all — she has talent, grit, determination, and fighting instinct — but she has not yet developed the match-winning instinct.

Her serve has improved, her ground strokes have become much better — her forehand can be ferocious, her return of serve is quite effective: all of which points to a new improved Sania.

But, and sadly there is a but, she must first fulfil that potential before she becomes more than India’s best tennis player. She had to become a world class.

The burden she carries is greater than just that: India has had good tennis players but we have still not broken into the top three category, whether in the men or the women’s games.

Sania is now 21. She has to aim much higher than her current ranking of 31. And for that, she needs the one thing she lacks — consistency.

A player who can defeat Svetlana Kuznetsova and Martina Hingis has no business losing to Meghann Shaughnessy. She has had a fairly good run at the Australian Open, reaching the third round last year.

Clearly the hard courts suit her game better than either grass — a shame for a player from India — or clay, the nemesis of so many much greater than her. Her best showing in fact has been at the US Open.

What Sania needs to incorporate into her game immediately is her brain. She must study her opponent and counter attack. The current strategy of big ground strokes and going for broke no matter what can only lead to short-term gains.

The other pitfall she must try to avoid is concentrating more on doubles than singles. This is a danger many Indian players have not been able to combat. Doubles can come later. She must crack the top 10 rankings before that.

There is no doubt that there is great hope for Sania in 2008. If she can remain injury-free — though she seems to be injury-prone — this can be a breakthrough year.

Media attention and hype is not going to go away, Sania is a great ambassador for sport in the general, she is attractive and articulate.

As long she doesn’t let any of this get in the way of her tennis — and she has been remarkably mature so far — there is no reason why she cannot shine on.

Ankita Pandey

We saw the hair — long, cropped, coloured, Tarzan-like, we knew he batted like he was writing a cricket manual of his own, we even gossiped about his ‘interest’ in Deepika Padukone. We dissected Mahendra Singh Dhoni in 2007 and watched his every move under the microscope.

The man still surprised us, pleasantly, with the one trait we prayed to God he had in abundance. Leadership!

Appointed the captain of a young team for the ICC Twenty20 World Championship in South Africa, Dhoni took to the role like he was born for it. He led a bunch of rookies to an unforgettable win in the championship.

He was decisive, calm, calculated and mixed that with just the right amount of exuberance and controlled aggression to script the triumph.

One is still amazed at how composed he was during the semifinal and final of the tournament. In the panicky last-over wins against Australia and then Pakistan, he was so cool, it was almost scary.

We then knew it had to be a good sign, a sign of a man on top of the situation, a sign of a man knowing what he wants, a sign of a true leader.

Since then he has captained India in two ODI series, a 2-4 loss to Australia and a 4-1 win against Pakistan.

2008 could very well be the year that Dhoni takes over the Test captaincy from Anil Kumble, who we were made to believe was a stop-gap arrangement until the selectors felt Dhoni had had enough exposure or was it experience?

Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the future of Indian cricket. He can mould this team to take the leap and become the best in the world. If he does it right and the team answers to his call, like they have till now, we could well witness a very prosperous MSD era. Starting 2008.

Like Sourav Ganguly before him, who took over the captaincy at a time when the sport was reeling after the match-fixing scandal, Dhoni came in at a time when Rahul Dravid gave it all up on what now seems like a whim since no explanations were forthcoming from him. Ganguly went on to become the most successful and tenacious captain in Indian cricket history.

Dhoni will have his own share of challenges. In the coming year/years, he might have to deal with the loss of some of the greatest players — Tendulkar, Dravid, Ganguly, & Kumble — the country has produced.

Whether the absence of Fab Four will inspire the team to heights such as T20 triumph or leave it shaky, has a lot to do with how the man in-charge deals with it.

The future is MSD, the future is Yuvraj Singh, the future is Sreesanth, the future is Robin Uthappa. It’s a generation of seekers, go-getters, who truly believe they are the best. They are full of josh and attitude! It’s the generation of Mahendra Singh Dhoni.