Is MS Dhoni not being given enough credit for his wicketkeeping?
I was asked once about the most difficult job in cricket. The question was like a subset of a larger set of skills that together constituted the action that transpired on the field. Surely, batsmen in the 1930s and 1940s playing on uncovered wickets, tackling deliveries that could go anywhere off a length, with no helmets or protective gears would have been tough. Some would easily classify it as the toughest.
Others would point out to the close-in fielders, who, even to this date, risk their bodies to get a chance to snap the opposition’s mainstay, or maybe put their bodies behind the bulleting ‘red thing’ emanating out of the batsmen’s arsenal like gunfire. Maybe that is the toughest job in cricket, albeit severely underrated.
Amidst the contest between the bat and the ball, the Holdings and the Chappells, the McGraths and the Tendulkars, some of the most underrated yet extremely pivotal men on the field are lost, and are remembered only when the main men, the ones with the cherry or the willow, turn to them in the anticipation of a culmination to the ongoing action.
This is where the question asked of me was answered by the person who asked it. Perhaps the most ordinary creed of men who played the gentleman’s game, who perhaps existed just for the sake of it, just because the team couldn’t afford to waste another fielder in their position, and those who took up the trade and made it their own, quietly, without a fuss, be it on or off the field-- the wicketkeepers.
Wicketkeepers: The underrated creed
If you select a random keeper and ask about how they took up the trade, you’d most often find either their desperation to get into the team, or the needs of the team itself. Jim Parks, a former England wicketkeeper, who kept for the Three Lions back in the 1930s and 40s said in an interview that he’d become a keeper by accident. While playing for his county team, the regular wicketkeeper was injured, and the captain had asked him to don the gloves.
Most keepers that we’ve witnessed have been makeshifts rather than the ones who were born to keep. No one’s born to keep in cricket. Compared to the plethora of batsmen and bowlers that teams boast of, there are keepers you can count on your fingertips.
There have been only Rodney Marsh, Ian Healy, Adam Gilchrist and Brad Haddin. There have been only Godfrey Evans, Alan Knott, Alec Stewart, and Matt Prior. There has only been Mark Boucher, only Adam Parore and Brendon McCullum, only Romesh Kaluwitharana and Kumar Sangakkara, only Wasim Bari, Moin Khan and Kamran Akmal.
Likewise, there have only been Syed Kirmani, Kiran More, and Nayan Mongia. And, there has only been MS Dhoni.
MS Dhoni: One of a kind
India’s nostalgia and rhetoric over their cricketers are perhaps the greatest flaws deeply ingrained within arguably the most passionate cricket fans in the world. Indians do not like change, do not want to give way to it, and anyone who tries to do the contrary is looked down upon with contempt and disgust.
The stature of the cricketer or the person in question and his contribution to the team stand nullified if the change presented in front of them doesn’t agree with their preconceived notions. Hence, when Dhoni expressed his desire to bat up the order, the fan jury passed the verdict that he should go.
When Dhoni failed to finish matches in the final overs, when his ‘bait-you-till-the-last-over’ heroics didn’t work, the fan jury wanted him to go. The same jury wanted him to go when he couldn’t win India the World Cup semi-final, as if he was destined to do so.
But the jury has been all but silent when the most intrinsic skill for which the man was picked in 2004-- the skill that has left batsmen bemused, more for the fact that the bails were off rather than the fact that they had missed the ball-- has only ripened with age. MS Dhoni, the wicketkeeper, over the years, has emerged as the wicketkeeper that India needed, but perhaps the one who grew so much in stature that the world forgot that he was a wicketkeeper too.