Dhoni The Simple
I’ve always felt that cricket attracts a brand of sportsmen different from the usual lot. Here is a sport that can hold within its ranks players like Kumar Sangakarra and Rahul Dravid, two deeply intellectual and thoughtful men (with the former even studying for the bar exam). Unlike in, say, tennis, whose superstars are essentially superior robotic drones, cricket — thanks to its sheer length and complexity — requires thinking athletes, full of character and, often, controlled restraint.
Along comes Mahendra Singh Dhoni to shatter that paradigm. In a wide-ranging interview with Cricinfo, Dhoni reveals his thoughts on his recent success as India’s ODI captain. It quickly becomes clear that, unlike Greg Chappell, who was known to spend hours and hours talking about cricketing theories, Dhoni prefers simplicity. Send your players positive, uncomplicated signals, and stay calm. He doesn’t appear to go into strategy much, preferring to talk “overs” instead.
The surprising part, however, comes when he’s asked about his own thoughts on cricket (you know, the sport he’s played since a teenager):
How intense a student of the game are you?
I’m not really a keen watcher of cricket. Even in the last World Cup, in South Africa, I just watched Sachin [Tendulkar] bat. The last game we played, we lost to Australia, and I only watched Sachin bat. I cannot sit in a chair and watch. I don’t study cricket too much. Whatever I have learned or experienced is through cricket I’ve played on the field, and whatever little I have watched. And statistics, I know nothing. If you ask me “Who is the first player to do this or that?” you won’t get anywhere close to a correct answer from me.
Do you look at matches played at venues previously?
Of course. My video analyst supplies all the facts to me … but everything changes, you know. In Australia the wickets were very different. To start with, I had great difficulty reading the wickets but by the end I was quite good. You keep in mind what happened in those conditions before, but normally you look at the wicket and decide what will happen or what may happen. We played with a couple of spinners on more than one occasion and some people thought that those were not wickets where spinners would get any sort of help, but they ended up helping them.
So would you say it is through experience that you interpret the conditions and opposition?
I don’t really sit in front of a laptop and analyse everything. I attend the bowlers’ meetings and all and most things get into my head. I don’t have to push anything into my head. Reading and getting anything into the mind is tough for me. If I visualise something or if I see something, it gets more quickly into my head. Instead of wasting four hours reading something, I would rather see something in clips and get output out of it.
Why do you think that is? Is it impatience or restlessness?
It doesn’t attract me. It’s not restlessness, because I get glued to video games for three or four hours.
Cricket - I could never sit down for three and a half hours to watch a whole innings. When I started understanding cricket, back then it was mostly the first 15 overs, depending on start. If Sachin and Sourav are batting and they don’t get out for five overs then you know that till the 15th over the match will be interesting. If either of them carried on - they were aggressive and used to go after the bowlers - I used to watch till the game was interesting. After that I would wait for the 40th or 42nd over. I have never watched a game from the first over to the 50th over.
How absolutely distressing! Not only does he clearly abjure anything remotely intellectual — like, um, reading — but he’s not even interested in watching the essential and most unique parts of cricket. This is not to say that Dhoni’s stupid or a bit of a dud (as Mohammad Yousuf is rumored to be). But he governs mostly by instinct and a little observation, not reflection or scheming. When he later talks about insisting on taking the boys out to the movies, you realize how young and silly cricketers can be.
Maybe it’s time I gave tennis another look.
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