On Thursday (16th January), the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has announced the latest Annual Player Contracts for the men’s senior national cricket team. One of the big talking points in this announcement was missing the name of former successful Indian captain MS Dhoni. Is it the sign of Dhoni’s international retirement?
The latest Annual Player Contracts for Team India (Senior Men) is for the ongoing season 2019/20. It will run between October 2019 and September 2020. It has four different grades with different payment structures, where the BCCI named a total of 27 players. But they have removed MS Dhoni from this list, who was in the Grade A in the last season.
Here is the details list of the latest Annual Player Contracts for Team India (Senior Men)
| Grade A+ (INR 7 crore) | Grade A (INR 5 crore) | Grade B (INR 3 crore) | Grade C (INR 1 crore) |
| Virat Kohli | Ravichandran Ashwin | Wriddhiman Saha | Kedar Jadhav |
| Rohit Sharma | Ravindra Jadeja | Umesh Yadav | Navdeep Saini |
| Jasprit Bumrah | Bhuvneshwar Kumar | Yuzvendra Chahal | Deepak Chahar |
| Cheteshwar Pujara | Hardik Pandya | Manish Pandey | |
| Ajinkya Rahane | Mayank Agarwal | Hanuma Vihari | |
| KL Rahul | Shardul Thakur | ||
| Shikhar Dhawan | Shreyas Iyer | ||
| Mohammed Shami | Washington Sundar | ||
| Ishant Sharma | |||
| Kuldeep Yadav | |||
| Rishabh Pant | |||
The 38-year-old MS Dhoni is inactive in cricket since the semi-final defeat of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019 against New Zealand. Moreover, he hasn’t officially clarified whether he will return to the national team in future or not. So, there is no big surprise in MS Dhoni’s omission from this list. But the major question is arising that is it the sign of Dhoni’s international retirement.
Story of MS Dhoni’s international career
MS Dhoni made his international debut in December 2004 through the ODI cricket. Since then, he quickly evolved himself as a top wicketkeeper-batsman of the country. While once the Indian national cricket team was continuously searching a proper wicketkeeper-batsman who can perform consistently, Dhoni’s enter finished that hectic as he performed consistently in all the international formats. Soon he became one of the top wicketkeeper-batsman in the international cricket history, and he has maintained this identity till his last game.
During the leadership crisis in Indian national cricket team, MS Dhoni was handed over the captaincy in limited-overs cricket. It has been proved as one of the best ever decisions in Indian cricket history as Indian cricket moved to the top position during his long captaincy period. Soon after taking up that captaincy role, Dhoni led the national team to win the inaugural ICC World T20 in 2007. It was the beginning of a big success story in Dhoni’s era.
Due to his successful captaincy in limited-overs cricket, he was awarded the Test captaincy after the retirement of Test skipper Anil Kumble in late 2008. India also achieved massive success in Test cricket under Dhoni’s leadership as they reached the top of the Test rankings for the first time since the ICC officially began it in 2003.
Captain MS Dhoni also guided the national team to win their second ICC Cricket World Cup trophy in 2011 while he won the Player of the Match award in the final. In 2013, captain Dhoni added another feather after winning the ICC Champions Trophy that made him the first captain to win three different ICC trophies.
In December 2014, captain MS Dhoni retired from Test cricket but continued the limited-overs format. Under his captaincy, India were the runners-up in the ICC World T20 2014 as well as they lost the semi-finals of ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 and ICC World T20 2016. Dhoni stepped down from the limited-overs captaincy roles in early 2017 but returned to that role for only one more ODI during the Asia Cup 2018 (against Afghanistan in the Super Four stage).
However, despite moving out from the limited-overs captaincy role, he never stopped to guide the young Indian side.
As a wicketkeeper and middle-order batsman, MS Dhoni played a crucial role in the ICC Cricket World Cup 2019. Though he was criticised sometimes for his slow batting performances, his performances were always crucial for the team. He (50) and Ravindra Jadeja (77) almost became the heroes for the nation during the semi-final of that tournament against New Zealand, where they almost snatched an impossible-looking victory, but their last moment dismissals broke the nation’s heart. The senior wicketkeeper-batsman was emotional during that dismissal, and it was the last time when we saw him in international cricket.
In the almost 15-year-long international career, MS Dhoni has played 90 Tests, 350 ODIs and 98 T20Is.
What’s next for MS Dhoni?
Since the CWC 2019 semi-final, Dhoni has made himself unavailable for the game. After remaining silent for a long time, finally, he asked to not question about his cricket future till January 2020. While it is the middle of January 2020, there is no clarification on Dhoni’s future in international cricket, but most likely he will be available for the upcoming IPL season (IPL 2020).
Recently, the Indian head coach Ravi Shastri has clarified that MS Dhoni may end his ODI career soon but his possibility to feature in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2020 will depend on IPL 2020 performances. So, his T20I future is also currently not sure.
Though there is no assurance about MS Dhoni’s future in international cricket, looking at the current situation, we can say that it is the last phase of his international career.