Mahendra Singh Dhoni: Is Captain Cool for real?

A new biography asks the question but struggles for an answer

MSD: THE MAN, THE LEADER
Author: Biswadeep Ghosh
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Pages: 195
Price: Rs 245

Last week, when Ravindra Jadeja bowled one that caught Imran Tahir in front of his stumps, his team mates were ecstatic. Virat Kohli and Shikhar Dhawan, as is their wont, wore the widest grins they ever had on their faces. And the way Suresh Raina clasped Jadeja, you could be forgiven if you thought you were watching an enactment of the Bible's story of the long-mourning father getting to embrace his repentant prodigal son. Even the normally phlegmatic Ravichandran Ashwin had a skip in his walk. And why wouldn't they be happy! They had just beaten one of the favourites, South Africa, a prodigious challenge at any time, more so when India had been written off after a dispirited tour of Australia just days before the World Cup began. Amid the joyous huddle was Mahendra Singh Dhoni, smiling brightly. Long used to an inscrutable face irrespective of whether his team had lost or won, fans got to see a wonderful TV frame of a happy captain with a happy team.

Characteristically composed at the end of the match against AB de Villiers' team, he spoke as candidly, and as even-handedly, as he had done when India had pathetically lost the third of the four matches in the tri-series Down Under just a month earlier. No wonder he has become a legend in Indian cricket as the unflappable stalwart, even accorded the trite appellation of "Captain Cool".

"Is the calmness real or simply an approach which he has consciously adapted to make sure that the players could give their best irrespective of the situation the team was in?" asks Biswadeep Ghosh in his latest biography, MSD: The Man, The Leader. If I read a book on Dhoni, I would definitely want to find the answer to the question. But this is not the first book on the Indian captain that fails to provide a revelatory look into his mind.

There have been other books that have trodden the same route: first, a few interviews with the wicketkeeper-batsman's relatives, his childhood friends, his school coach and, to give the man his due for having helped India find a hero, Paramjit Singh, the owner of a small sports shop in Ranchi who helped Dhoni both with money and kit in times of necessity; then, extensive discussions of matches with most of the adjectives employed being superlatives; and ultimately a narrative that depends on the faux psychology that locates modern Indian cricket in small-town Bharat. What the reader misses in such an approach is an insightful look at a performer who is a true phenomenon given the unpromising circumstances of his birth in a poor family in a state that is not known for encouraging cricket. And amid all this, my grouse with Ghosh's book, as with the others on Dhoni, is that this has been written without a single interaction with the cricketer himself.

There isn't much in the book that one hasn't already read about except perhaps the revelation that it was Sachin Tendulkar who, when approached by Sharad Pawar, then president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, to lead India after Rahul Dravid stepped down in 2007, proposed Dhoni's name for the job. Dhoni was duly appointed captain and, as the cricketing gods would have it, led India to the first Twenty20 World Cup in South Africa, the first in what was to become a handsome career as India's skipper.

As captain, his unusual ploys (who can forget his using Joginder Sharma to bowl the last crucial over to win the Twenty20 World Cup or promoting himself over Yuvraj Singh in the 2011 World Cup?) have been both applauded as well as flayed. The book carries a quote from Sourav Ganguly, arguably India's sharpest purveyor of the art of captaincy, that seems to me the best insight into the way Dhoni looks at captaincy and why he has succeeded as well as failed. "Captaincy is a spark, it's not just preparation or the homework, it's about the spark on the field, which MS (Dhoni) has. He's got that extra bit of luck you require in captaincy. I have never believed too much in the drawing board. I see a lot of that in MS Dhoni. He doesn't believe in team meetings and all. He just does what he sees on the field."

If the author had dwelt on Ganguly's views, he might have seen Dhoni for what he is: a man who leads by intuition that is sharpened by the events on the field, not someone who creates scenarios off the field for extension to the theatre of action later. Exercising captaincy in this manner requires a bit of luck, which Dhoni, without taking away from his talent, has got aplenty. It could also explain his famed "cool" attitude - if you do not have Plan A or Plan B meticulously worked out to ensure victory, failure wouldn't frustrate you so much. Not that Dhoni is complacent about defeat. His backstory tells you of his fierce determination to win at all costs, even in an occasional badminton match. But as he explained his role as captain to Wisden India: "The captain decides on something but it is somebody else who has to fulfil the job. …You try to read the game and decide something. If it doesn't work, you stand up and take the responsibility because that's what your job needs you to do."

Dhoni wasn't a man made for the mike, the book claims, and he was painfully shy of speaking in public before captaincy demanded it of him. He used to have his hair done in a comically named Manly Beauty Parlour in Ranchi. Chased by women, he often gave them his brother-in-law's phone number, leaving a bemused relative fielding amorous calls. But such cues to his life are few and far between. And I wish the book had had an editor with a firmer finger on the delete key.