Dhoni And The Opportunities In Pune

If MS Dhoni is able to deliver as the captain of the new Pune team of the IPL, he would have made sure that nobody else but he gets to to decide on the final years of his international career. 

I live in Pune, the city that has turned into the proud owner of a newly born franchise M S Dhoni will play for in the Indian Premier League (IPL). The former Indian skipper in all the versions of the game — and now, just the shorter versions — may not be the darling of the mainstream media any longer. At 34, he is not a youngster who has enough time to reinvent his approach to batting and captaincy either. But many Puneites are happy, smiling, optimistic.

The locals are expecting Dhoni to become that miracle-maker, who had walked in at number 3 and scored a magical 148 against Pakistan in his fifth ODI at Visakhapatnam about one decade earlier. Such memories are seldom the best assessor of reality as it exists, which constitutes the core of Dhoni’s dilemma. He must live up to the hopes manufactured by the memories of his batting pyrotechnics when he used his homegrown approach, not technique since he had none, to demolish the opposition in his heydays.

He is expected to lead by example, not dependence. That will be tough.

Why is the city so hopeful?

Pune Warriors India represented the cricketing aspirations of the city for three years until the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) terminated its agreement in 2013 after the franchise was unable to furnish the necessary bank guarantee in keeping with the orders of the Bombay High Court. During its tenure, the Pune franchise performed miserably, finishing second last twice and last once.

Now, Pune has something serious to cheer about: a Sanjeev Goenka-owned franchise, which has picked up the Indian skipper in the shorter versions. Suddenly, there is a feeling that no power on earth can stop it from journeying a long distance in the IPL. That doesn’t imply a tournament win, but Dhoni is expected to take the team much further than his predecessors from the long-dead local franchise had.

What are the larger implications?

Reams of newsprint have been consumed to publish that Dhoni’s future as a captain is over. Virat Kohli must take over. The old guard needs to make way for the new, and it is high time Dhoni understood that his form and consistency as a team leader had come to an end.    

If Dhoni believes that the perspective in circulation is a myth, his job of the leader of a new franchise offers him a great opportunity to disprove it. Rarely a big innings player in T20s, he can step out and hit those power-packed sixes in his brief but significant knocks to turn the destiny of a few matches in his team’s favour. In a few such albeit shorter stays at the wicket, he can show that the manner in which he played against the South Africans in an ODI in Indore recently was not a fluke that came off on a good day.

He can run like a hare between the wickets like he still does, although Suresh Raina, his young find with whom he has shared many important partnerships, will be missing in action. He can set the right fields, make the correct bowling changes and shift the discomfort of the burden to an opposition that finds itself in an advantageous position. He must not face any criticism that he doesn’t dive as well as he should or take catches against medium pacers (although his keeping against spinners is usually left unquestioned).

Narrating what he ought to do is infinitely easier than doing what Dhoni has to do as a player-captain. If he delivers some powerful outcomes, he will prove that he still has what is required of him to put up those rock shows at the international level. If he doesn’t, he will disappoint Pune, which has experienced a renewal of hope. The mainstream media will reduce him to tatters by evoking memories of his fine show with the Chennai Super Kings until the latter killed itself.

In fact, it should not surprise anybody if Dhoni, should he fail to deliver, is asked to work out a retirement strategy and relinquish the skipper’s seat for Kohli to take over.

That advice will hurt Dhoni, a star who was born in Ranchi, a city that hadn’t produced a single cricketer at the international level until he came into being.