Surprisingly, for some reason, MS Dhoni, through not efforts of his own starts making news on Twitter each time the Indian cricket team fails to win an ICC trophy. Be it the T20 World Cup or now the World Test Championship final, Dhoni fans on Twitter constantly send reminders about what the great MSD achieved as captain. The only skipper to have won all three major ICC titles – the T20 World Cup, 50-over World Cup and the Champions Trophy, Dhoni’s contributions to Indian cricket will always remain immoral, but to bring it up everytime after every tournament at times, gets a tad too much, even for MSD’s former India teammates.
After India were handed a crushing 209-run defeat at the hands of Australia in the final of the World Test Championship – India’s nine consecutive failure in an ICC event – a tweet praising Dhoni broke the internet. It said, “No coach, no mentor, young boys, most of the senior player’s denied to take part. Never captained any single match before. This guy defeated prime Australia in semifinals and won a T20 World Cup in 48 days after becoming captain,” referring to Dhoni’s famous India win in the inaugural edition of the T20 World Cup in 2007, months after India went crashing out of the 50-over World Cup in the West Indies.
As history has it – Dhoni fearlessly led a bunch of youngsters in that tournament in South Africa defeating teams like South Africa, England, Pakistan twice and as the tweet mentioned Australia in the semifinal. He took it a step further four years later winning the World Cup for India in 2011 and added another feather in his cap when India defeated England in the final of the Champions Trophy in 2013 on their soil.
However, as brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime and special those achievements are, Indian cricket has moved forward, and these frequent Dhoni throwbacks tend to do more harm than good. In a day and age, where social media has become a fodder to trigger emotions, former India spinner Harbhajan Singh tore into the tweet, reminding everyone once again of cricket being a team sport and not a captain’s game.
“Yes, when these matches were played this young boy was playing alone from India… not the other 10. So, alone he won the World Cup trophies. Irony when Australia or any other nation wins the World Cup, headlines say Australia or etc country won. But when India wins, it’s said captain won. It’s a team sports. Win together, lose together,” he tweeted.
Harbhajan was part of both Indian squads that won the World Cups in 2007 and 2011, but despite that, the former spinner was met with criticism. Fans reminded Harbhajan that reacting to a fan tweet is a ‘new low’ for former India cricketers while some of their minds harked back to Bhajji’s ‘slap-gate’ incident involving S Sreesanth in the first-ever IPL. (Hindustan Times)