England vs India, 2014 - MS Dhoni explains the rationale behind standing back to Ravindra Jadeja
India’s win in the 2nd Test of the 5-match series against at Lord’s saw more than a few unusual sights. You had an Indian fast bowler in Ishant Sharma bouncing out the England batsmen, Bhuvneshwar Kumar showing the English seamers the lengths to bowl on a typical English surface, but what was the most startling out of them all was MS Dhoni standing back to the left-arm spin of Ravindra Jadeja. Now Jadeja does bowl quickly by a spinner’s standards, but not so much so for Dhoni to be standing a few steps back.
This strange occurrence took place in the 21st over of India’s 2nd innings with the ball, when Alastair Cook and Gary Balance, both left-handed, were at the crease. There were many footmarks for the spinner to make use of while bowling to the left-handers, and Jadeja, being the accurate bowler that he is, hit the footmarks on a regular basis. The ball started misbehaving out of those rough patches, with some balls taking off while some didn’t rise above ankle-height, making the job of the wicket-keeper extremely difficult.
Commentators, with plenty of experience of watching the game, were baffled by Dhoni’s move to take a few steps back to the spinner and could find no rationale in him doing so, going on to say in an amusing manner that the last time they had seen something like this was in school cricket.
Dhoni, though, was undeterred by the criticism directed his way and continued standing back to Jadeja for left-handed batsmen throughout the innings. When asked to shed light about his strange move after the match, he revealed that in order to have an extra fielder, and not breaking rules of cricket while doing so, he took this step.
He said in the post-match conference, "I wanted to have a fielder there. But according to the rules of the game you can't have three fielders there. I wanted Virat to stand slightly wide of where he was standing because anything like a snick or a faint edge on the leg side would go between him and me. So the plan was to stand behind and cover that."
The rules don’t allow more than two fielders behind square leg (the fallout of Bodyline), and hence Dhoni opted to position himself there.
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The 33-year old went on to add that his plan of standing back was aided by the fact that the English batsmen never really came down the track to Jadeja, which took a chance of a stumping out of the picture.
"If the batsmen kept stepping out and playing, I would have had to go in," he said. "They didn't really step out so I had the liberty of standing back and trying to catch the ball at both ends, but nothing really came to us.
"The good thing was, they didn't really step out and miss one because that would have been a perfect thing for the commentators to talk about."