Test of technique for captain Dhoni

It’s not a secret,this failing of Dhoni’s. In England,he fell four times to this shot,caught behind or in the cordon,front foot halfway out of the crease,bat swinging loosely away from the body. In India,the shot very often gets him easy runs wide of cover. When movement and bounce are thrown into the mix,it becomes fraught with peril.

Dhoni’s stand-and-deliver methods have therefore been far less successful abroad. Away from India,he averages 34.00 as compared to 43.00 at home. Only one of his five Test hundreds has come overseas,that too on a Faisalabad featherbed. In Australia,where the bounce makes it even more dangerous to throw a diagonal bat at the ball,he averages 17.00 in ten innings,with a highest of 38.

Dhoni has himself admitted in the past that his technique isn’t the soundest. On the eve of the Sydney Test,he said he would have to find a way around it through shot selection rather than making any wholesale adjustments.

“I don’t look to do too much adjustment,” he said. “(I keep them) as small as possible because,what I’ve learnt over maybe the last 15 years,right from school days,(is that) it’s very difficult to change in just one series or couple of series so what’s important is to adapt well,look for where you are weak and try to avoid the deliveries that can get you out.”

At the nets,facing Zaheer Khan,Ishant Sharma and Abhimanyu Mithun,Dhoni looked to avoid as many length balls outside off as he could. The ball thudded loudly and repeatedly into an advertising banner hung behind the batsman. Occasionally,the temptation to launch into an expansive drive on the up proved too strong,and the ball sliced into the corner of his net. Dhoni reacted impassively,as always,but you could see he was making a painstaking effort to weed out this weakness.

Right mix

The critical thing for Dhoni,when he walks out to bat in front of an SCG crowd resplendent in pink,might be to balance a sense of caution against the moving ball with the need to remain positive and go after balls in his zone. Recently,he has looked likeliest to succeed abroad while counter-attacking from the start,a method that fetched him twin half centuries at Edgbaston. Both knocks,however,came in nothing-to-lose situations with only the tail for company. Dhoni recognised that it might be tricky to replicate that kind of freedom at all times.

“In Test matches,you have to see where your team is at that particular point of time when I go into bat,” he said. “Generally,there’s a batsman with me,and,previously we used to have Harbhajan at eight and now we have Ashwin and both of them can bat,so if I’m batting with one of the batsmen or with Ashwin or Harbhajan,we’ll look to get some kind of a partnership going,but once that batsman gets out I look to go after the bowlers to get as many runs as possible,and sometimes you get runs,sometimes you get out,so we’ll like to see how it goes. If I’m with a batsman I would like to play proper cricket but if I’m with the tailenders I’ll look to get as many runs as quickly as possible.”

It won’t be easy for Dhoni to find a way to make his homegrown technique work in Australia. The wicket for the 100th SCG Test seems to have enough grass on it to keep the ball jagging around for a while. But somehow,he’ll have to keep out the good balls,and unlock his potential for game-changing explosiveness that,away from home,has tended to remain dormant all too often.