Who Is The Best, Ganguly Or Dhoni?

When it comes to deciding who’s the better Test captain, the jury is still out. Firstly, a confession is in order as a cricket fan. All of us who follow Indian cricket religiously were getting tired of seeing India lose at Test cricket both home and away. It is a real delight to see the team return to winning ways. Two resounding victories against the Australians at Chennai and Hyderabad is a sign of resurgence, leaving an 18-month nightmare behind. 
    
It is grossly unfair to suggest that this Australian side is the worst ever to tour India and hence the value of these victories is diminished. It is nearly the same Australian side (the bowling is exactly the same) that thrashed us 4-0 a year earlier and almost beat South Africa, the world’s number one Test team, a few months back. There’s nothing to take away from the fact that Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his boys have played excellent cricket over the last two matches and have the results to show for their efforts. 
    
In winning the two matches, Dhoni has become the Indian captain with the most number of Test match wins under his belt – 22 from 45 Test matches. Soon after the Hyderabad win was accomplished, comparisons between Dhoni and Sourav Ganguly went viral on social media networks. Dhoni, to his credit, downplayed the statistic in the post-match press conference, saying that such figures hardly matter. He is entirely right. 
    
To say that Dhoni has won more matches than Ganguly or even Sunil Gavaskar and hence is a better captain is to completely miss the point. Statistics, when you compare eras, don’t always provide the best answer. For example, there is little to compare Indian cricket of the 1980s and now. 
    
Three and a half decades ago, winning consistently was not even on the radar of the Indian Test team. Winning in Australia was considered an 
aberration and a draw was a more than acceptable result. To win an away series in difficult conditions wasn’t a realistic proposition in the 1980s or 1990s, an unfortunate reality that underwent a transformation under Ganguly at the turn of the millennium. 
    
After beating Steve Waugh’s world champion Australians at home in 2001, Ganguly’s India drew against England in England in 2002 and subsequently went on to draw the Test series in Australia in 2003-04 1-1. It was a series that India should have won and one which they dominated. Soon after, we beat Pakistan in Pakistan for the first time in 50 years. 
    
In scripting these away wins, Ganguly was creating a habit – the winning habit. Indian cricket was on a rapid march to maturity and India was the only team that competed with the Australians on an even keel in the years 2001-05. To put it bluntly, it was under Ganguly that the foundation was laid. It is on this foundation that Dhoni has built the superstructure. 
    
But it must be acknowledged that Dhoni, who has won India two World Cups and 22 Test matches, will leave behind a legacy he can always be proud of. He is Ganguly’s real successor and has managed to continue with the winning habit at home even if his away record is in need of serious improvement. That is not to say Dhoni is a superior captain to Ganguly, for never under Ganguly did India lose eight Test matches on the trot in England and Australia. 
    
More importantly, the manner of these losses, abject capitulations at best, will leave a black mark on Dhoni’s glittering captaincy record. From July 2011 to December 2012, Dhoni failed to stem the rot, and in the process, lost the number one ranking in Test cricket. What hurts more is the fact that the England debacle came at the back of winning the World Cup at home in April 2011, an achievement that has little parallel. From an absolute high, Indian cricket plummeted to the depths within a matter of months. 
    
The point, then, is fairly simple – it is impossible to compare Ganguly and Dhoni’s success rates as captain and suggest one is better than the other. Dhoni may have won more matches than Ganguly, but he has also lost more away Tests, an important marker of success in Test cricket. 
    
But it is also important to note that Ganguly’s away success doesn’t make him superior to Dhoni. Under Ganguly, India did not scale the pinnacle of Test cricket and never could we believe that India could be the number one team in the world. India was like a top 10 singles player in tennis parlance, winning many ATP events but failing to go beyond the quarterfinals of the Grand Slams. Under Dhoni, we are definitely among one of the fab four of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, consistently making semifinals of Grand Slams and going on to win some outright. 
    
Dhoni, however, has an opportunity to conclusively tilt the balance in his favour. If India manages to perform in South Africa in November-December against the world’s undisputed number one team, there’s going to be no further debate about who is the best Indian captain ever. Until then, the jury is out.