Comment

MS Dhoni

India produced a calm, matured performance to lift the World Cup. You have to admire the self-belief and class of MS Dhoni and his men, for not once did the team flinch in the eye of the storm. It was service as usual, whether Mahela Jayawardene was playing a classic or Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar had been condemned to the confines of the dressing room.

India remained unfazed and ran past all hurdles with the magnificent Dhoni clearing the flag post with a huge six to win the race for India. And for Tendulkar.

In sport, you can prepare a lifetime and still not make the podium. Even with an astonishing body of work behind him, Tendulkar was pricked by the thought of a winless World Cup career, a heartache that he had shared with his team and country. Dhoni’s men took upon themselves to grant him his wish, especially as he had never asked anything of them, and stuck together for Mission Tendulkar. Winning the Cup was the best gift they could have thanked him with for his unfathomable contribution.

An ODI career even as rich and magnificent as Tendulkar’s needed the topping of a World Cup win because all ODI performances mean less if you have not held that trophy in your hands. With his career now reaching climactic portions, he will look upon this win as, possibly, the biggest of his career as it officially stamps him a champion.

We know that Tendulkar’s appetite for runs is insatiable but with the World Cup in the bag and nothing much to look forward to, he can now move on from this format to the more sedate but challenging medium of Test cricket, a platform that still needs his genius.

Speaking of genius, India could not have won the Cup without Dhoni. You can rave about other performers in the team but they are dwarfed by Dhoni’s impact on the tournament. A few years ago, who would have known that hidden behind the exterior of a placid, rustic face was not a simpleton from Ranchi but a shrewd sinewy competitor? Any other person hailing from such an unfashionable part of India would have suffered from a seizure of low self-esteem. But Dhoni is built like a fortress, impenetrable and grand. Sanjay Manjrekar told me that when he popped a question to a great Indian batsman about Dhoni, he replied that Dhoni know his boundaries.

He may have never crossed his limits with Tendulkar or Sehwag, but that did not make him a soft captain. In fact, he was not shy to throw a challenge at his men after the South Africa collapse, when in a shielded manner, he denounced the penchant of a few to play more for the gallery than the cause of the team.

Captaincy, besides other things, is about straight talk and issuing timely warnings to players. India never looked back in the tournament after that siren was sounded by Dhoni.

How he maintains balance and brilliance between wicketkeeping and captaincy, both of which are pressure-filled, punishing and thankless tasks, is worth a case study. His famous Hindi comments at a press conference, in fact, sum up his calm interior: “Pressure lena nahin hai, dena hai!”

He picks players like film directors do, only those who suit the script will make it a successful story. In this World Cup, he made strong decisions that did not sit well with common logic.

Piyush Chawla made a comeback on sound cricket grounds that a leg-spinner is not only a wicket-taking option but a match-winning option at home against non-Asian teams. He introduced R Ashwin to new-ball bowling and had the guts to relaunch Ashish Nehra in a big semifinal game against Pakistan in place of Ashwin, who was now the popular choice.

Benching Yusuf Pathan and bringing in Suresh Raina was another jigsaw that he solved effortlessly. Such gestures showed his uncluttered approach towards cricket, based on his own analysis.

A World Cup victory can not be weighed. How can you have a scale for pride, passion, delight or honour? India got all that and a lot more from Dhoni’s team.

Now, India must responsibly use the tag of world champions tag and show, with grace and dignity, the leadership qualities in governing the game. They must deal intelligently with thorny issues like DRS, playing Pakistan, player fatigue, managing the three formats to ensure their attractiveness and efficacy, globalisation and helping the minnows.

Even though it may have been hard on the Associate members, the decision of a 10-team World Cup is justified. Fans want quality and competition at such a high-profile event and we saw quite a few mismatches in this World Cup.

Having said that, the minnows need constant grooming and attention. Disengagement will defeat the purpose of globalisation. They need to be nurtured and should be allowed to play big-ticket events only after they have shown improvement.

Pakistan may have returned home empty-handed, but they won a million hearts. The players were greeted like heroes because the whole nation became united.

The world also got to see the strength of an Indo-Pak contest. All those powerful personalities who were cold and indifferent towards Indo-Pak clashes queued up and cashed in on the occasion.

The governments, the media and the ICC had been given enough evidence of the enormous strength of Indo-Pak tussles. Uncoupling the two nations could result in a turbulent world and also a colourless cricket calendar. Yet, all of them allowed the most engaging of cricket rivalries to get affected by petty politics.

To me, that game in Mohali — more than the final in Mumbai — was the heart of the World Cup.