Dear MS Dhoni, we still enjoy watching you play, retire when you want to
India’s exit from the 2016 World T20 on Thursday was not just marred by the two no-balls or by Ravichandran Ashwin not bowling the last over, but also another incident after the game when MS Dhoni was for the 20072011th time , asked about his retirement.
The 34-year-old answered the question in his very own inimitable style, calling the journalist onto the dais and asking him a few questions himself and eventually after having heard the answer from his mouth, Sam Ferris left the stage, amidst loud laughter in the room.
One of the first lessons that an aspiring journalist is taught in school is to always be the neutral. Never take sides, even if it involves a person whom you have admired growing up. But at the end of the day, a journalist is also, within his heart-of-hearts a fan.
That fan aspect of this was, dare I say, seen in the Sri Lanka series in February, when someone asked Dhoni about why he didnt play the helicopter shot often these days.
Dhoni, in his charactersitc way, gave a solid answer stating that the shot could be played only for a particualar delivery and with bowlers adopting a different length nowadays to him in the death overs, he could only play it if he stood on a stool.
Anybody, who has seen the game in the last few years, knows that the only form of yorker that bowlers bowl to him are the ones wide outside off-stump and to hit a helicopter shot of those are as hard as it gets.
My take on the Ferris story is a bit neutral.
The one angle to look at it from is that maybe he didn’t know that Dhoni had been asked this question by the press back home innumerable number of times and so he went ahead and put forth the query, purely because he wanted to.
The Dhoni angle to this is that it had now reached a point for the Indian captain,where he felt it was enough. He had already indicated that he was not all happy when the retirement question was put forth in a few other press interactions.
In the last bit of that conversation with Ferris after he had gotten down from the dais, Dhoni referred to how he wished an Indian journalist had asked him this query and how he would have asked him, whether he had a son or a brother, who was a wicket-keeper.
The statement has more meaning to it than you think.
Do we in India at present have a keeper who can replace or be even half as smart as Dhoni is? Can any keeper do what Dhoni does coming at 6 regularly? The answer is no.
In one of my earlier articles, I had written about how much Dhoni the player had contributed to India’s success in the limited-overs format. The 2016 World T20 only provided us with more evidence about how important he is from a wicket-keeping point of view as well.
Dhoni the captain has achieved everything there is to achieve in colured clothing. But that doesn’t mean that you stop playing. As he told recently in a video released on the Indian Cricket team Facebook page, his greatest cricketing achievement was not winning all those trophies, but getting into the side.
He isn’t like the 20-year-old engineering student, who doesn’t know which elective to chose, whether to go for the one where he would pass easily or the one that would help him in the future.
At 34, Dhoni exactly knows where he is heading, how much time he has left. Just like he did in Test cricket, he will leave when he feels he isn’t enjoying the game anymore and none of us need to keep asking him about when he is going away.
There is a question that you should perhaps ask yourself whenever the retirement issues props up again: Are we no longer enjoying him play the helicopter shot? Are we no longer enjoying his lovely messages that get heard from the stump-mike, but most importantly, are we not enjoying the presence of Mahendra Singh Dhoni on the field?