Spotlight on finisher Dhoni in one-day series

All things being equal, Mahendra Singh Dhoni will later this month become the second Indian player in less than three months to have played in his 300th one-day international.

Yuvraj Singh accomplished the feat during the course of the Champions Trophy in England in June and Dhoni, who has 296 appearances so far, will join the select club when he plays the fourth ODI against Sri Lanka to be played in Colombo on August 31.

The focus at the moment, however, isn’t on Dhoni’s imminent achievement. It’s rather about his future in the Indian limited-overs set-up. Questions have been raised about Dhoni’s relevance in the team for some time now and his obvious diminishing power with the bat has been held against him since the series against New Zealand in 2014. And those voices have only become strident since he gave up the limited-overs captaincy at the beginning of this year.

The numbers though tell a different story. Since the three-match ODI series against England, before which he quit limited-overs captaincy, Dhoni has played 13 matches while accruing 386 runs at a staggering average of 64 and a strike rate of 86.35. Given his career average of 51.32 and a marginally better strike rate of 88.69, his performances since the start of this year strongly argue for the former India captain’s continuance in the team. And given his high fitness standards, his smart work behind the stumps and the wealth of experience that he brings to the table, it is indeed difficult to look beyond the Jharkhandi. That being said, there is little doubt that he isn’t the same force with the bat despite the favourable numbers.

The man who instilled the fear of God in bowlers’ minds doesn’t appear as imposing anymore. His once successful tactic of taking the contests deep and finishing them off in style isn’t working any longer -- the latest example being the fourth ODI against West Indies in Antigua early last month, when India failed to overhaul the hosts’ 189/9 with Dhoni managing a 114-ball 54 on an admittedly sluggish pitch. Every now and then, Dhoni does dish out vintage stuff, like he did in Cuttack against England. His 122-ball 134 was a reaffirmation of his prowess but such innings have progressively become a rarity, especially while chasing.

By design or team compulsions, Dhoni has batted down the order for most of his career and relied heavily on his explosive power to finish games. That not being the case now, it’s time for Dhoni to revisit his methods.

With the right-hander likely to bat at five, more often than not he will be walking in to bat with substantial overs left and given his recent outings, his old style of batting is fraught with danger. If he eats up too many deliveries in the middle overs to accelerate towards the end and gets out without finishing the job, as it happened against West Indies, it will hurt the team’s cause.

Unlike most top-order Indian batsmen, Dhoni has always relied on unorthodox means. He isn’t the traditional sub-continent player, say someone like Virat Kohli who uses his wrists to find gaps and rotate the strike. Bowlers across different nations appear to have finally cottoned on to Dhoni’s inability to find gaps and constantly land the ball outside off-stump with a packed off-side field. With his latent inability to work the ball to the leg, Dhoni has often gone scoreless for long periods of time. This, in turn, affects the rhythm of the batsman at the other end, besides putting pressure on the batsmen to follow.       

Between the trip to West Indies in July and his visit to Sri Lanka now, Dhoni has had enough time to analyse and introspect on his game. And hopefully, he would have redesigned his game to suit the team’s demands. Starting with the Sri Lankan series here, India will be playing a number of ODIs at home against Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka, who are scheduled to tour later this year. It is a fairly long spell for the selectors to decide if Dhoni remains as valuable as they look to find the nucleus of the team with the 2019 World Cup in mind.