The team with MS Dhoni that won the 2007 World Cup was quite an inexperienced one, and a similar thing happened when he won the 2013 Champions Trophy in England. One of the unique abilities of Dhoni was to able to make the players better and make an average team perform beyond their ceiling and win championships over the years. Former Indian cricketer Sanjay Manjrekar pointed out that the skillset of Dhoni is a unique one.
“I would rank Imran Khan from the days gone by, and after that, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, as to what he was able to do as a captain. I thought he single-handedly raised the bar for the team and got even, maybe an average team sometimes, an inexperienced team, for example, in that 2007 T20 World Cup to go and win titles,” Manjrekar said on Stalin Mathias’ YouTube channel.
“And I think he was different when it came to performances on the big stage. He played the final just like he would play one of the earlier league matches. I think the moment, just that whole stay that you have for the big finals, can get to a lot of players and definitely gets to a few captains as well. MS was different in that regard,” he added.
Shreyas Gopal reveals what makes MS Dhoni great
Dhoni’s former teammate at Chennai Super Kings, Shreyas Gopal, lauded Dhoni’s ability to be humble despite all the success he had seen over the years.
“It’s very hard to be MS Dhoni; it’s extremely hard. People think that it’s very easy to be MS Dhoni. There is a lot of fame and people shout [cheer], but to be him, to be so grounded and to be so humble and to be so empathetic, caring is very hard. And you also understand that he’s also a human being. He loves doing very simple and basic things, and that is his greatness,” Gopal said on Sports Yaari.
“Mainly, it’s basically how to handle a player, how to put a player in a tournament, who to use for the specific over, tactically, there have been so many talks with him. And there’s no one better than him; everyone knows that. So, learning captaincy, learning how to finish matches, just learning how to, the way he deals with his stardom,” he added.
