MS Dhoni can do well with a bit of luck

If Santa Claus was around, the only gift MS Dhoni would have asked him was one moment of luck. The India skipper has managed to lose the toss at the most crucial occasions. His poor luck with the coin has had a telling effect on the current series, although one cannot blame the captain for that. The situation in the second Test, needless to say, would have been different, if he had won the toss.

“You can’t blame him,” Ravi Shastri, the former India skipper, said. Shastri had conducted the toss for the SuperSports and Ten Cricket. “Bad luck. He is having a very poor run with the coin,” he said.

In an unprecedented sequence of tosses, Dhoni has managed to call it wrong in 12 out of the last 13 Tests, two of them in the current series. Record books show the result of the Centurion Test as India lose by an innings and 25 runs but the pundits have had no qualms in declaring that if Dhoni had the option of putting the hosts in, the results of the first Test would surely have been different. Clive Rice, for one, had said that South Africa won the Test because of their luck with the coin.

Dhoni has been repeatedly asked about his poor run with the toss and his reply, rightly so, has been that it is out of his control. Surely there is no art of winning the toss but Shaun Pollock, a former South Africa skipper, had an advice from the late Malcolm Marshall. The West Indian great used to say that one should always call heads. Why? “Because men have only heads, not tails,” Pollock said in a lighter chat. On Sunday, Dhoni called it heads but did not win it. As a rule, the host captain flips the coin and his counterpart makes the call.

Graeme Smith is no great shakes with the toss having about 50 per cent record with the coin. But significantly enough, he has won the toss of both the Tests of the series. Someone like Rice is not too happy with Smith’s decision to put India in but conditions here have been too bad to bat first.

Ian Chappell has this famous thing about the toss. He often says that his grandfather had advised him to bat first on winning the toss. The former Australia captain’s theory is that nine out of 10 times a captain must bat first. And on the 10th occasion, he should think a little bit and then decide to bat. Few can question the cricketing sagacity of Ian Chappell who is supposed to be knowing everything about the game of bat and ball. If only Smith heeded to that advice…