Calling MS Dhoni an “inspiration” on his retirement from Tests, former Indian captain Rahul Dravid hailed the unbelievable impact Dhoni has made on Indian Cricket after emerging from one of its small towns.
During an interview with ESPNcricinfo, Dravid was quoted in saying:
“For someone to come from a small town like Ranchi, to go on and captain India and play 90 Test matches, to do it the way he has, I think he brought a lot of dignity to the job of captaincy,” Dravid said. “He might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he was his own cup of tea and he led with a lot of success and that can never be taken away from him.
“And he’s been an inspiration. If there are kids in small towns today dreaming and aspiring for great things, not only in cricket but in various fields, then MS Dhoni has a lot to do with it.”
Dravid expressed that Dhoni was a captain who led “more by example than by rhetoric or by words”.
He said:
“He was a captain I enjoyed playing under. One of the things I liked about MS was, what you saw was what you got. Very uncomplicated, always led by example. One of the things I really liked about playing under MS was that he never asked you to do anything that he himself didn’t do.”
Dravid also said that Dhoni was never defensive as a captain and felt that maybe Dhoni didn’t have the bowling resources to be able to take 20 wickets, and at many stages, he found himself always behind the four-ball.
“He was never defensive when captaining in India. When he had spinners, he was always attacking, on turning tracks, he was willing to force the game. But in overseas, it’s hard to attack for the sake of attacking when your runs are leaking at four, four-and-a-half an over, when your batsmen – as it happened on the two tours I played at the end of my career in England and Australia – are struggling as well. We just didn’t put enough runs on the board for a captain to be aggressive and attacking enough.
“Yes, he would be a bit disappointed that he could not maybe transition the team as well as he would have liked overseas over the last four years, and maybe he felt it was the right time for someone like Virat Kohli to take that forward and possibly he felt he’d taken Indian cricket as far as he possibly could as a Test captain,” Dravid added.