Time has flown and it's been 14 years since a strong boy with long hair from Ranchi made his mark on International Cricket. As Vikram Sathye famously said- 'Nobody apart from Lord Krishna had made headlines for consuming a certain amount of milk everyday'. Such has been the phenomenon of MS Dhoni. For a good reason or a bad one, one way or the other, MS has always been the headline of Indian cricket for the past decade or so. It's quite surreal to think that such a guy with calm head who likes to keep a low profile has been on the front pages for so many different reasons. It is also quite bizzare to think of the enormous change that has happened in everything about MS right from his hairstyle to the bat sponsors and everything else!
From the days of 2004-2007, MS gave us the idea of how hard a cricket ball can be hit with as much arrogance as Vivian Richards used to showcase while chewing a gum! If you needed 20 off the last over with a new batsman in, everyone would have gone for MS back then. When he got the captaincy in 2008, he showed us how a team mixed with veterans and youngsters can be managed and how unprecedented success can be achieved with tactics and some shrewdness attached to it. Oh and how can we forget the luck as most of us call it. I would like to go on and say that when a man gets 90% of the things right with unimaginable dedication, he definitely deserves the luck and no one can deny that MS was destined for some! Yes, he didn't have much of a success in test matches overseas but he was the man who led India to the number 1 ranking in tests nearly after half a decade. If MS had won tests in Australia and England, he would have won everything that a captain can win in cricket and on a lighter note,that wouldn't have been fair on the game of cricket because even the great Steve Waugh couldn't win a test series in India and to me, the Greatest Ricky Ponting was denied an Ashes win in England.
MS always played cricket with not the most perfect technique rather with an ugly one. He was never and isn't the perfect timer of the ball, but he never missed out on the timing to make key decisions. One such decision was handing over the test captaincy to Virat Kohli in the middle of the series in Australia and retiring after realising that he hasn't got much of a cricket left as far as tests are concerned. MS's career has never been short of surprises and the biggest surprise was probably the time when he quit the ODI captaincy too with Champions Trophy just around the corner. But Virat has been assisted by MS a great deal and it is fair to say that though Virat is the Captain, MS is still the leader!
If MS has a billion fans, he probably has half a billion haters and that's the saddest thing one can think of. Apart from being a very good and successful captain, he probably is the greatest wicketkeeper Indian Cricket has ever produced. Though, he doesn't get the respect he deserves, it's time for everyone to realise the legend of MS Dhoni and respect him because it is no secret that he is in the twilight of his career and we might have seen the best and we might be witnessing the last of MS Dhoni!
Very precise!!!👍
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