Why 'Dhoni' Was 'Manmohan Singh' Of Cricket Captains?

Both had spectacular early successes. Both should have retired earlier. Mahendra Singh Dhoni announced his retirement from Test cricket in Australia, a country where the position of Test captain is often compared to that of prime minister. 

For all but the last seven months of Dhoni’s reign as Test captain, India’s prime minister was Manmohan Singh. At first glance, the Harley-riding inventor of the helicopter shot ‒ Captain Cool, to his fans – has little in common with the soft-spoken Oxford DPhil. Yet their career arcs as leaders are uncannily similar.

In Dhoni’s first two-and-a-half years in charge, India did not lose a single series, and rose to No. 1 in the ICC rankings for the first (and only) time. If he had stepped down as Test captain after winning the World Cup, he would have been acclaimed as India’s greatest-ever skipper. Dhoni in 2011 was like Manmohan Singh in 2009. In his first term as prime minister, Singh had overseen unprecedented economic growth, popular social legislation, and a civilian nuclear deal with the US. He could have retired in 2009, universally respected and, perhaps uniquely for a politician, the recipient of an uncontroversial Bharat Ratna.

But it is not in the nature of leaders, especially Indian ones, to give up power at the height of their success. Dhoni’s Test captaincy since 2011– not coincidentally a period in which India played most of their cricket away from home – was even less successful than Singh’s notorious second term. Most reports of Dhoni’s retirement note that he won 27 out of 60 Tests, making him India’s “most successful” captain. Some – especially in the international media – add that only six of those 27 wins came away from home.

But Dhoni, like Singh, benefited in his early successes from favourable circumstances. For the prime minister, a global economic boom, stable public finances inherited from the National Democratic Alliance, and an incompetent opposition. For Dhoni, a calendar that saw India rise to No. 1 through a series of home victories, plus relatively easy away assignments in New Zealand, West Indies and Bangladesh. Dhoni reached No. 1 without captaining a single Test in England or Australia, and only three in South Africa. Since July 2011, India have played 18 away Tests under him. They won only one, at Lord’s, losing 13 and drawing four. It is not a record that Zimbabwe or Bangladesh – or, indeed, India in the 1950s – would be proud of.

The similarities between Dhoni and Singh go beyond mere results. Confronted with increasingly difficult circumstances, both were unwilling or unable to change their methods. While no one could accuse Dhoni of weakness, he was certainly guilty of an odd passivity. In the past year, as India allowed a series of potentially winning situations to slip away – in Wellington, Nottingham, Brisbane, Melbourne – he was as inflexible and inept at ending tailend partnerships as Singh had been at taming food inflation or reining in the fiscal deficit. Dhoni’s insistence that what mattered was the process, rather than results – as exemplified by his faith in Ishant Sharma. Most damningly, both captain and prime minister were silent on, and thus morally if not legally complicit in, corruption and cronyism. For Singh, the 2G, CWG and coal scams; for Dhoni, match fixing and conflicts of interest.

Ultimately, MS Dhoni as Test captain and Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister are best understood as fish out of water. Singh made his reputation as a reformist, courageous finance minister, in contrast to his image as an ineffectual prime minister. In limited overs-cricket, Dhoni is an unfailingly confident and often innovative captain with the ability to both control and change a match. Perhaps his finest captaincy was in the 2013 Champions Trophy final where, defending a small total, he spooked England’s batsmen by attacking with multiple close fielders, inducing enough errors to win.

As a one-day and T20 batsman, he is an all-time great. In home Tests, too, his formula of instructing curators to prepare slow turners – thus nullifying opposing fast bowlers – failed only once, against England in 2012, when India came up against a team with better spinners than its own. He was a destructive if inconsistent Test batsman at home, his 224 against Australia at Chennai last year being one of the finest innings played by an Indian. Harsha Bhogle, one of Dhoni’s giddier admirers in the media, once described his one-day batting as akin to playing a video game using all the cheat codes. In Tests away from home, he often captained like a man gamely trying to run the latest version of Fifa on a PC from the 1990s.

Thanks to his enduring popularity and, especially, to his relationship with BCCI chairman N. Srinivasan, Dhoni’s position as captain was virtually impregnable to the end. When the selectors voted to remove him as captain in 2012, Mohinder Amarnath has said, they were overruled by the BCCI President. Like Bhishma, and unlike every past (and hopefully future) India captain, Dhoni was free to choose the time of his own departure. Keeping, batting and captaining India in three formats, plus Chennai Super Kings, he has borne for six years a physical and mental workload without precedent in the history of cricket. His keeping, never better than adequate, has visibly suffered, and Dhoni has done well to retire before his own place as a player is questioned. Here the similarity with Manmohan Singh is less in the manner of departure than in the nature of the successor. Virat Kohli and Narendra Modi are brash, aggressive, and openly ambitious. They explicitly contrast their proactive desire to succeed with the passivity of their predecessors – a new approach optimistically endorsed by Indian cricket fan and Indian voter alike.

Dhoni’s final Test was, in many ways, a microcosm of his Test career. In the first innings he was caught behind, feet following hands, a dismissal we have seen too many times to count. Dhoni is notoriously fond of placing a fielder at leg-slip – an inefficient and thus eccentric attacking position – and in his final Test as captain, managed to have the opposition’s best batsman caught at leg-slip. On the fifth day he made little attempt to bowl Australia out, playing for a draw rather than force the win needed to keep the series alive. Yet his career ended with him calmly saving a Test for India, Captain Cool to the last.

Unlike Manmohan Singh, whose achievements as finance minister and first-term prime minister are now forgotten or at best ignored, MS Dhoni’s struggles as Test captain will not cloud his reputation. Most fans care much more about one-day and T20, and his achievements in those formats are indelible. But it was corruption, not falling GDP growth rates, that did for Manmohan Singh. Dhoni’s place in history may come to be judged less by his batsmanship and captaincy than by future revelations about the Indian Premier League, N. Srinivasan and Rhiti Sports, which will determine how we see this period of Indian cricket. A time of limited overs success, the democratisation of the game, immense wealth, and unchecked conflicts of interest – in every sense, it has been a period embodied by Mahendra Singh Dhoni.