A man possessed
When Mahendra Singh Dhoni left the field today after having lashed 148 inonly his fifth innings in international cricket, he had imprinted such anarray of astounding strokes on the memory of those watching that a dozenknowledgeable observers could
Chandrahas Choudhury in Visakhapatnam
05-Apr-2005
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When Mahendra Singh Dhoni left the field today after having lashed 148 in
only his fifth innings in international cricket, he had imprinted such an
array of astounding strokes on the memory of those watching that a dozen
knowledgeable observers could have each picked a personal favourite and no
two choices need have been the same.
A purist might have gone for the off-drive for four with which Dhoni got
off the mark, or the lofted extra-cover drive that took him to 99; lovers
of big hitting could have taken their pick from his four sixes, two over
long-off and two over midwicket; and those impressed by audacious
improvisation might speak reverently of his little tip shot over the
wicketkeeper's head for two, or the lap sweep he brought off to a full
delivery from Abdul Razzaq, skipping swiftly across his stumps and,
bending low, sending the ball very fine for four with a cross-batted stroke.
Others might choose to dwell upon general features of Dhoni's batting as
marks of his special ability and self-belief: the manner in which he
smites short-of-length balls over point like Virender Sehwag, the
confidence with which he plays balls coming into him inside-out through
point and cover, his forays down the pitch or across his stumps to
unsettle the quick bowlers, and his willingness to hit the ball in the
air even with the field set back. It was fitting that when he came out,
batting at No.3 for India for the first time, it was to join the rapacious
Sehwag. Their partnership of 96 for the second wicket in a little more than ten
overs was a glimpse into the future of Indian batting.
Dhoni had been knocking on the doors of the national team for quite a
while - at least since the time he took two cracking hundreds off Pakistan
A in a tournament in Nairobi last August. But one of the curses afflicting
wicketkeepers who show talent with the bat is that they nevertheless
continue to compete only with the wicketkeeper who is the current
incumbent, and not the six batsmen in front of that keeper. On the
evidence of this performance Dhoni should have been pipping one of VVS
Laxman, Yuvraj Singh, and Mohammad Kaif much before this.
Dhoni's pent-up ambition - he hardly did anything of note with the bat on
his debut tour of Bangladesh last year - and desire to come good was
evident even from the more peripheral aspects of his game today. For all
of the two-and-a-half hours he spent at the crease he sprinted between the
wickets like a man possessed, his long mane of hair bobbing below his
helmet, and Rahul Dravid had to calm him down and tell him to take it
easy after one particularly frantic series of twos when he was in the
nineties. And once he had got to his hundred his command over the bowling
was total. It is not everyday that Shahid Afridi, who is devilishly
difficult to collar because of his variations and changes of pace, goes
for more than 80 in nine overs.
In his few games Dhoni's wicketkeeping has gone largely unremarked - and
this is one sign of how sound his glovework has been thus far. Of course
there will be more said about his keeping as more is seen of him, but the
question now before India is whether - despite the good form displayed
recently by Dinesh Karthik - there is any way in which Dhoni can be kept
out of the Test team. Although there are still a couple of rough edges to
his batting, like a tendency to play uppishly through gully, few captains
would want to ignore the allure of a wicketkeeper-batsman who can turn a
Test on its head in the space of an hour from No. 7.
It seems hard to believe now that only last March Rahul Dravid was keeping
wicket in Pakistan for want of a wicketkeeper who could bat adequately.
Indeed, Dravid himself may have been thinking of the piquant reversal of
this situation during the partnership of 149 he shared with Dhoni today,
in which he played the supporting role while his younger partner took
centrestage.
When Dhoni finally skied a ball to midwicket and was caught, he departed to
a standing ovation, with his everpresent swagger and with the
red tints in his hair glinting in the sun. It felt as if something had
changed violently within the long-settled and familiar order that is the
Indian batting line-up, as if an explosion had gone off whose echo would
ring in the ears for very long.
Chandrahas Choudhury is a staff writer with Wisden Asia Cricket magazine.