3 cheers to Dhoni cheers:
#If Suresh Raina had held a catch far easier than the blinder he took in the semifinal, Saturday...
#If Manpreet Goni had not snatched at a chipped return...
#If Chennai had managed to convert these, and other half chances, during the early phase of a clearly nervous Yusuf Pathan’s innings...
#If Balaji, who as the penultimate over wound down was seen looking nervous in the outfield and who, with ball in hand, held his nerve for three crucial deliveries hadn’t gotten cute with the fourth ball, attempting a back of the hand delivery when the full length was working just fine...
#If Parthiv Patel, whose heart is wide and waistline wider for a man of his years [He has a problem getting down to deliveries below his knees, the commentator of the time said; Parthiv’s tailor might agree, and his best friends will likely suggest he do something about it—his talent is not in question, he needs to make sure he isn’t let down by physical limitations] hadn’t added a free run to that wide with the silliest of fumbles...
In a game won by one run off the final ball of the match, those were too many ‘ifs’, and any one of them was enough to make the difference between defeat and victory. That brings me to my two favorite post-match moments:
#It is common in sport to see the losing finalists wandering forlorn around the ground while the winning team whoops it up; for a moment, the Chennai team seemed set to follow tradition.
And then Mahendra Singh Dhoni waved them all together, brought them together in a huddle, and was seen speaking to them earnestly. The huddle ended in a whoop; the smiles came back and the players wandered off to congratulate their opponents, looking far more at ease in their own skins.
And, #2, at the post match presentation,
when Dhoni was asked to pick the turning point of the match, he refrained from mentioning a single one of those moments listed above; refrained, too, from waffling on the lines of ‘If X had used some commonsense...’, as a more illustrious name had done recently. Instead, he said [twice] that the team had lost, that mistakes had been made with bat and ball and in the field, and implied that there was no point, no need, to pick any one player, any one mistake, for public castigation.
When making leaders of men, this is the kind of stuffing you need. Smoke Signals
I not surprised that Dhoni has a World Cup in his kitty, while the
illustrious is still searching for one for past 20 years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by diabloo When an MI bowler bowled a wide in the last over, Sachin made a hue & cry over it in the presentation ceremony. Today he was in the stands and watched a CSK bowler bowl a wide in the last over. Dhoni didn't mention about that.
Maybe Sachin got a lesson is sportive behavior. |
.... I like that Royals won, because
it underlines a lesson Indian cricket has never been able to learn—that it is not so much about having the world’s best batsman and the world’s best opener and the world’s best number three and such; it is about being able to forget the self, set aside individual agendas, and work as a unit towards a common purpose; it is about a captain who spends as much time or more with the raw unknowns who need his inputs, his strength, as he spends with the stars; it is about being able to rise above individual limitations and become, through that process of alchemy we, for want of a better word, call ‘leadership’, greater than the sum of the individual parts.