Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni doesn't seem to be getting any wiser with passing age, but there is one change in him that's quite perceptible. His answers to the Media's questions, which invariably would be longish and more often than not predictable, are getting as short as the time he spends at the crease these days.
Indian cricketers, by and large, inflated by the greens and overawing fame, are vulnerable to complacency. Dhoni has rode his luck thus far and to be fair to him, has deserved his spoils. What has failed to get into his -- what is usually labelled as -- "ice cool head" is, on the cricketing turf, nemesis does catch up.
His spinning gambit against the dour Englishmen backfired as it had to, yet, like the proverbial rope that refuses to un-knot itself, Dhoni persisted in the tactic until his mistake snowballed into a Himalayan blunder.
All the good work that Ashwin and Co did was brought to an effective nought by the seasoned Swann and Panesar.
After the much vaunted Indian batting line-up collapsed like a pack of cards at the Bangalore T20 against Pakistan, Dhoni made a profound observation: "We should have got more runs on the board. We got a good start, fantastic effort by the openers but then we kept losing wickets after that. We were short by 10 or 15 more runs which we should have got easily. 145 would have been a safe score on this track."
Of course, the skipper that he is, he conveniently skipped the fact that it was his lazy, casual shot that triggered the collapse. And if he knew 145 was a safe score, he had enough firepower in his batsmen, inluding himself, to score those. Hasn't it been sometime that he has been pleading for the induction of more energetic and younger players in the team? On a few occasions, he has either obliquely, or through convoluted statements suggested that the so called dead wood in the team may be shown the exit door. If only he could realise that he finds himself at the crossroads for precisely the same reason.
The Dhoni influence, what with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) chief N Srinivasan doing his bidding, worked with bigwigs like Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman. My gut feeling is the three whose names record books would feel proud to have, didn't hang their boots in very happy circumstances. If we are to go by Laxman's version, Dhoni didn't even show the courtesy of picking up his call before he announced his abrupt retirement. By his own admission, Dhoni sounded proud of the fact that he was a difficult person to get through to. Wonder how the skipper interacts with juniors. Or is it easy for his bloated ego to deal with players who are trying to cement their place in the national side?
All's not been very well with the Indian team. There has been no love lost between Dhoni and Sehwag. Not that Sehwag is a holy cow by any means, but the likes of him have to be handled with kid gloves. Yet, during the series against the Kangaroos, Dhoni squarely laid the blame on oldies who he felt were not agile and energetic on the field. The oldies included Sachin Tendulkar as well, but Tendulkar could carry on, being too big for Dhoni to play games with.
In recent times, Dhoni has been blaming the batsmen in straight or very many words. He seems to have lost sight of the fact that apart from keeping wickets, he has to defend his own as well. The much trumpeted helicopter shot has almost diappeared and the Dhoni we see today is a run grafter rather than the aggressive batsman we have known him to be. His post-match briefings are as un-exciting as the batsmanship he displays these days. His captaincy in the past few seasons has been unimaginative. As Ganguly rightly pointed out "He looks a great captain when he is winning."
What you give unto others, comes back to you eventually. The clamour for his sacking is becoming louder. Yes, Kapil Dev and Sunil Gavaskar did say that Dhoni was still the best bet since there was no viable alternative at the moment, but that opinion is pregnant with meaning. He is the captain by default.
The Aussie team is also going through a transitional phase. The Australian Cricket Board had a similar predicament knowing Ponting's glorious days were over and it was time to hand over the mantle to Michael Clarke who wasn't exposed well enough to the rigours of the job. But the ACB took a decision and reposed faith in him. Clarke more than proved equal to that task, just like Alaistair Cook did when Andrew Strauss paved the way for him.
The BCCI must learn to take hard decisions. Dhoni's logic of giving younger players a chance should apply to himself to begin with. Remember the West Indies Criket Board too did not hesitate to dump the likes of Richards, Lara, Haynes, Richardson when they weren't performing to their past potential.
Keeping someone in the team merely on the basis of his past laurels isn't great cricketing sense. Indian cricket has any number of examples of those who got an extended charity just to enable them a place in record books. If "why" rules over "why not" while annoucing retirement, the BCCI must give them a honourable exit and a place under the Sun.
Question is will they?
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