Dhoni and the Chennai mania

As the ball flew off his bat, the fielder at long-on briefly braced himself for a possible catch. But only very, very briefly. He craned his neck and saw the little white orb sail over his head, over the hundreds in the stands behind him, out of the stadium, into orbit. It was the most emphatic of blows, the most emphatic of statements.

The protagonist knew, from the moment the ball struck his scything willow, that the ball was headed only one place, that the only outcome was a six. Not just a piddly, tiny six but a gargantuan, stadium-clearing one. The rarefied air of Dharamshala played its part in propelling the ball but truth to tell, it needn’t have, such was the finality with which the blow had been unleashed.

Until that April night in 2010, no one had seen Mahendra Singh Dhoni in this avatar. Not when he led an unfancied Indian side to the T20 World Cup crown in Johannesburg in 2007. Not when he had marshalled India’s climb to the top of the Test charts in 2009. Not when… You get the picture, right?

There was a certain poignancy to the moment as Dhoni looked down – perhaps to befuddle lip-readers? — and uttered several words to himself. To say that he was charged up would be an understatement. He hadn’t won the title, not yet at least, but he had ensured that his team was still in the race to do so. It was a must-win outing for Chennai Super Kings in IPL 2010, against Kings XI Punjab. Get through at the HPCA Stadium and the reward was a place in the semifinals. Fall short, and it would mark the first time in three editions that the yellow brigade would not be in the business end of the tournament.

CSK’s target was a challenging 193 – we are talking a decade and a half back, not today when even the mid-200s aren’t safe – and they had left themselves with a fair bit to do until Thala exploded. He could do that once, remember? Maybe you say he can still do it, and who’s to argue with that? But he could do that once when batting up the order, when the match was on the line, not at No. 9 with only the formalities (in a losing cause) remaining.

Dhoni came out at No. 5, ahead of Albie Morkel and Justin Kemp, two South Africans who bashed the living daylights out of a cricket ball for a living. Unlike the other night when he allowed even R Ashwin, no disrespect but no power-hitter either, to bat ahead of him, at 80 for six when his team needed 117 off 43. Again, with due respect, Dhoni at 43 has still got it while Ashwin, five years younger, never had it in the second half of a 20-over innings. As if to prove that point, he smashed Krunal Pandya’s left-arm spin for two sixes and a four in the last over. Long after the horse had bolted, but largely because he himself had left the stable door ajar.

Dhoni congratulates Kohli at the end of the match.
| Photo Credit:
B. JOTHI RAMALINGAM

It’s been interesting to reflect on the reactions to Dhoni batting at No. 9 – No. 9, goodness – from CSK’s die-hard fans to whom Thala is more than a player, Dhoni more than a man and a cricketer. Like Sachin Tendulkar used to be — and perhaps still is, with a little less fervour – all over the country, Dhoni is an emotion when it comes to CSK. To Chennai. He is the man with the Midas touch, the man who can do no wrong. In the past, even rational minds have scrambled to find logic in some of his seemingly inexplicable decision-making. But following Friday night’s 50-run loss to Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the southern India IPL derby, Dhoni has attracted a fair amount of criticism for not coming higher up the order. It’s a first, but don’t mistake it for any diminishment of Dhoni’s aura in the Tamil Nadu capital. That’s a bond that will transcend time and space, victory and defeat, ecstasy and agony, titles and elimination.

Is there any way to explain this relationship? Between a (once) long-haired, straight-talking, still a bit rough-on-the-edges Jharkhandi and a fiercely proud city, indeed state, that didn’t frown upon outsiders but took some time to warm to them. But with Dhoni and Chennai, and Chennai and Dhoni, there was no breaking-in period, no teething troubles, no feeling each other out. It was mutual love at first sight.

Of the eight original franchises that kicked off the IPL in 2008, only CSK and Rajasthan Royals didn’t have ‘icon’ players designated by the Board of Control for Cricket in India. Okay, so Deccan Chargers didn’t either, but only because the extraordinary V.V.S. Laxman ceded that status so that the additional 15% that he would have got more than the highest-paid player of the franchise could be used for the development of cricket in his home state. At the inaugural IPL auction, CSK mastermind V.B. Chandrasekhar, that wonderful man who sadly isn’t with us anymore, pursued Dhoni with single-minded focus, beating back strong challenges to secure his services for a humongous US $1.5 million (approximately Rs. 9.5 crore at the time). That masterstroke is still paying off.

Did Chennai take to Dhoni because he made his Test debut at the M.A. Chidambaram Stadium, against Sri Lanka, in December 2005? Kidding, surely? Did Maharashtra, or Vidarbha, or even Nagpur, take to M. Vijay or S. Badrinath simply because the two Tamil Nadu batters made their Test debuts, 15 months apart, at the VCA Stadium in Jamtha? Chennai just took to Dhoni. Unlikely as it might have been, it seemed the most natural fit – between a man who couldn’t speak a word of the local language and a populace fiercely proud and protective of the autonomy of the said language. Maybe there is a lesson in it for all of us mischievously stirring up passions by viewing life through narrow-minded prisms.

That six off Pathan, the celebrations that followed, the visceral emotions, atypical Dhoni. That wasn’t a one-off. While he was the calm, composed, collected, poised, unflappable Dhoni with the Indian team – Captain Cool, after all – he was less guarded and less in control when it came to CSK. When the franchise was banned for two years, in 2016 and 2017, and when he had to perforce turn out for another outfit (Rising Pune Supergiants), he had no qualms in admitting that he hadn’t moved on from CSK, that he was at heart a CSK player forever. When the Chennai franchise returned to the fray in 2018, he could barely keep himself in check, nearly breaking down at a private function as the enormity of the moment got the better of him. The scripter of fairytales did what he does best – mastermind another spectacular coup to make the CSK homecoming a memorable one with a triumphant, stirring march to a third title. His already firmly embedded reputation as a shaper and maker of miracles was now set in stone.

Chennai fans wept unabashedly, unashamedly, unconcerned about what the world might think of them. Thala had delivered. These were tears of joy, of redemption, of salvation, of vindication, of faith fulfilled, of trust returned. Give him the keys to the city, already.

There never can be any one reason alone for any relationship to first take shape and then grow and blossom and thrive and flourish. From the early days when Dhoni took a two-wheeler for a spin in the then-unfamiliar lanes of Chennai, his long hair flapping in the wind, greetings exchanged at traffic lights, to now when he can bring the city to a standstill (almost) if he so desires, Dhoni and Chennai have come a long way. Tamil Nadu and hero worship have never been mutually exclusive but hitherto that has been reserved for movie stars and for movie-stars-turned-politicians. Geographical origins haven’t mattered – M.G. Ramachandran, for instance, was born in Nawalapitiya, a town in Sri Lanka’s Kandy district while J. Jayalalithaa’s birthplace is Melukote in neighbouring Karnataka. Ranchi-born cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni has joined that elite club. What a story that is.

It’s a story that has developed a mind of its own. Why would it not, when the man who has nothing left to prove, nothing more to achieve, thinks nothing of undergoing knee surgery when past 40 just so that he can keep playing for a team that is more than a home to him? Why would it not, indeed?

Dhoni doesn’t have too much cricket left in him – how often have we said that in the last few years? – but he’s still got it. Just look at the stumpings this season alone of Suryakumar Yadav and Phil Salt. Did you say 43? Ha. Just look at the ease with which he sent the older Pandya spiralling out of Chepauk. Perhaps CSK will be better off if he could do that a little earlier in the innings, a lot higher up the order. Because that has always been the Mahi way.