Good but not transformative: Summing up Dhoni's legacy as India's Test captain

Legacy is a heavy word. It comes loaded with the weight of times past and times still to come. If you are India’s cricket captain, it comes with the additional burden of the hopes and dreams of tens of millions. It is not an easy thing to shrug off.

The great irony about legacy is that it is both within a sportsperson’s control to determine and is also out of his or her hands. The manner in which MS Dhoni has gone about his career on his own terms is an example of the former. Even his retirement from Tests was announced on his own terms. He kept it to himself until the last minute and word was given without the typical staging of a press conference and a public farewell.

It has not gone down well in some quarters in the media. But Dhoni never believed he needed the media and was strong enough to ignore it right up to the end. A sit-down interview with Dhoni is rarer than platinum.

The determination of Dhoni’s record and significance as India’s Test captain is an example of the latter. It will be shaped and sculpted by those far beyond Dhoni’s circle and there is little he can do about it. It is the fate of sportspersons everywhere.

So how do we sum up Dhoni’s legacy? His career actually breaks neatly into two segments. The first is from 2008 to 2011, the second from 2011 to 2014.

After taking over from Anil Kumble in 2008, Dhoni won 14 of his first 24 Tests as captain while losing only three. India were all but invincible at home, winning 10 of 15 Tests and losing just one. They were a strong side away from home too, where they won four out of nine Tests and lost only two. Dhoni averaged 50.10 with three hundreds over that stretch. Outside of India, his average was 45.91 – still a very good number.

He was the right captain at the right time. India’s batting was stacked with battle-hardened legends and its bowling somehow threw up a revolving cast of match-winners. That team needed someone who could unite the dressing room and get everybody pulling the same direction. Dhoni’s preference for staying cool and eschewing emotions served the team well. Sachin Tendulkar told me in 2009 that the dressing room atmosphere under Dhoni was the best he had experienced. That is no small praise in a country like India where playing politics is part of the cultural fabric at every level of society. That transformation owes much to Dhoni’s leadership.

Then came 2011 and the world turned upside down outside India. Those battle-hardened legends suddenly appeared to have too many miles on them and the team suffered, as did the captain.

As all cricket fans know, following India’s World Cup win, India lost 13 of its next 21 Tests abroad, including those consecutive 0-4 series losses to England and Australia in 2011 and 2012. India won just two matches. Dhoni’s batting average sank to 28.10. The team wasn’t the same force and neither was its captain.

It wasn’t just the losses, though. It was the manner of the team’s capitulations. India simply weren’t competitive. Tests were regularly lost in under three days. It was embarrassing and dispiriting. And the captain gave little indication that he cared much.

“There is no difference in losing in three days or losing in five days”, Dhoni said after the India lost to England at Old Trafford. “A loss is a loss”.

In an interview with BCCI.tv in July of this year, Dhoni explained his hands-off style of captaincy:

“I don’t like to give a plan that the bowler is not comfortable implementing. I might want a bowler to bowl a particular length but it could be difficult for him to bowl that length 80 per cent of the time. So I let the bowlers start off with their own plan and own fields and encourage them to think for themselves.

”If I give them a plan, they will take it and keep bowling in the same way without thinking. And tomorrow when they’re on their own, they won’t know what to do. So, I let them execute their plan and when it doesn’t work, I step in with alternate suggestions. That way they understand why their plan didn’t work, they discover what works for them, and their overall knowledge about their game improves.”

Yet with India’s players repeatedly making the same mistakes with bat and ball, Dhoni was unable to adapt his approach and get his team to improve. With a pool of a billion people, talent is not the problem for Indian cricket. Attitude, application and mental discipline are more often the stumbling blocks. And it is in these areas that the captain has to set the tone. It is a captain’s job to get the best out of his team. Besides, Test cricket is not a finishing school, as Sunil Gavaskar pointed out on Tuesday. It is performance that must ultimately count.

Rahul Dravid hailed Dhoni an inspirational captain who led by doing rather than talking. But after 2011, but there has been little inspirational about Dhoni in foreign climes over the last three years. His keeping declined along with his batting and his captaincy was defensive and, at times listless. When his team needed a lift, he had to turn to someone else. Instead of believing he could prod and push his players to over-achieve, he seemed to sink back into complacency and acceptance that defeat was probable and victory impossible.

“Gradually, his captaincy lost all flair and aggression, especially abroad, and very often he was guilty of letting a game drift and letting the opposition off when he should have been exerting pressure,” former selector and India all-rounder Mohinder Amarnath wrote in his column for _Times of Indi_a.

This was Dhoni’s fatal flaw as captain. He could not inspire when inspiration was most needed, perhaps because his heart beats more for the speed and structure of the limited-overs game. The ramblings of the five-day format, with the vagaries of weather and pitch surface, are not as much to his liking.

The way Virat Kohli spurred his team on in Adelaide in this series was a stark comparison. Kohli elevated his team in defeat, something that could not be said about Dhoni.

It would be wrong to ignore Dhoni’s home record over the last three years. India have actually been more successful then prior to 2011, winning 11 of 15 Tests, while Dhoni’s effectiveness with the bat stayed roughly the same – he averaged 50.61

However, the quality of the opposition gives the game away. Five of those wins came against a very poor West Indies side while the Australians that toured in 2014 were clueless against spin bowling on turning pitches. That said, Dhoni flattened them with his outrageous 224 in the first Test. It would turn out to be his final heroic fling.

The two Tests that India did lose cost them the series against England in 2012-13, when Alastair Cook and Kevin Pietersen conquered India’s spinners and Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann outbowled them. Once again, Dhoni was unable to stem the tide when it turned against him. India won the first Test, but lost the series. A similar sequence would play out in England this year. India took a 1-0 lead after two Tests, only to lose the series 3-1.

The losses also exposed Dhoni tactically. If his hunches did not pay off, Plan B was always to sit and wait for something to happen. It allowed more forceful opponents to get off the mat and punch back.

Yes, India’s bowlers and batsmen often failed to deliver. Batting collapses and inconsistent bowling both hampered Dhoni. Those vices have also cost India the current series against Australia but the difference is this time India have also fought and kicked and scared Australia. The difference appears to be the new approach led by Ravi Shastri and Virat Kohli, where a winning mentality is prized over everything else. It is an approach in which Dhoni does not fit.

Dhoni’s equanimity and ability to treat victory and defeat just the same was both his triumph and his undoing. He is currently India’s most successful captain but he is also the man who took a modern Indian cricket team and sent it back to the 1950s and 60s, when India were helpless outside of the subcontinent and were sometimes referred to as the dull dogs of cricket. Dull is certainly a description of the kind of cricket India has played under Dhoni in recent times.

In the end, Dhoni was a good but not a transformative captain like Sourav Ganguly was before him. He was admittedly handicapped by the loss of India’s greatest batting generation, but should be held at least partly accountable for the lack of fire in India’s belly once they left.