Tiger Woods (and this was when he was probably the most popular sportsman on the planet, well before the world decided to judge him based on his personal life) once shocked audiences on a talk show when he said "My dad always said, when they're down, stomp on 'em!" Perhaps its our false sense of fair play that makes us feign surprise when we hear someone say something like this so openly when the truth is it happens all around us all the time. It is a natural product of competitiveness - realizing you cannot afford to give your opponent half a chance to get back after he's made an error or you could end up losing. And as popular as comebacks might be for audiences, there can be few things as devastating or demoralising as dominating an opponent only to see them come back from the brink and win because you could not close the game out.
Right now Dhoni is down. He is almost out too. He's endured a miserable year and a half, perhaps as shocked as any of India's cricket fans at how quickly and sharply fortunes have changed since winning the World Cup. Instead of trying to empathize, put yourself in his shoes and understand what he's going through (is it really so hard to understand that people who have been on a prolonged losing streak and who've been hounded left, right and centre by reporters baying for blood, are going to make the odd stupid comment or do you expect to always receive the banalities that the Australian team made a joke about and were criticized for not too long ago?), people have summarily dismissed him as a cynical, uncaring, T20 mercenary. There are those who've always had an axe to grind with him, and there has never been a better time to stick a few knives in him and kick him out once and for all. It was Dhoni after all wasn't it, who brought the entire team out at a press conference to ridicule outlandish rumours put out by sections of the sensationalist Indian media about a rift in the Indian dressing room at a time the team could ill afford such petty distractions?
They're a tightly knit bunch in the Indian sport journalist community and they don't forget slights too easily. Many who are quick to point out how big the egos of sportsmen (on whom they make their money writing articles about) are have developed egos just as large if not bigger, because they've fooled themselves into believing their articles are more important because of their unique insight, like everybody else's. Sharda Ugra seems to have had it in for Mahendra Singh Dhoni for a really long time, or I don't know, maybe just after he decided that it wasn't worth making the extra effort to keep himself in their good books and let his cricket do the talking? Her
latest article on cricinfo is a load of rambling rubbish, where she harps on one statement repeatedly to try and give credibility to her loathing of the Indian captain.
On no less than three separate occasions does she bring up Dhoni's remarks that the 2007 World Cup loss hurt more than the recent test series losses. Its what you usually do when you have scant evidence to back a ludicrous claim, shout the one point you have hoarse. The article gets more ridiculous and contradictory with every paragraph. She opens with a reminder that it wasn't just Dhoni who took India to the number one position and that "Besides, captains are only as good as their teams", then a short while later its "Dhoni has lost nine of 16 tests".. oh no, certainly not the captain only being as good or bad as his team there? There are the odd rumors from friends, oh sorry, "peers" who claim Dhoni called "day cricket" boring (protect those unidentified sources at all costs! especially if they don't happen to exist!) as a youngster. There's the standard street-smart gambling /hunch stereotype portrayal instead of a "daring piece of cricketing logic"... well maybe a "daring piece of cricketing logic" should tell you that neither Sehwag, who doesn't deserve a spot in any of the teams based on his form, nor Kohli who is among the most immature of cricketers going around and cannot command respect while he remains such, are anywhere near suitable candidates to captain India right now.
Should it be every cricketer's ultimate goal to think about the good of Test cricket? Every cricket captain? We know Ms Ugra has used Ponting as an example on more than a few occasions to ask how we would react to Dhoni if he was Ponting instead, so maybe we should go back to when the venerable Ponting put himself before the game and chose not to go for a series levelling win to protect himself from an overrate related ban, or when Mahela Jayawardene acted as proxy captain against the Spirit of the Game (Warne has been charged under this same offence in, get this, the BBL!)? Surely these acts deserved equal condemnation? Dhoni has always been a defensive captain, but he is not alone, apart from Michael Clarke in recent times captains from all sides have been defensive. Cook could easily have chosen to set India a target in Nagpur and try to bowl them out under the pressure of the chase instead of giving Trott and Bell the licence to bore test cricket lovers to death, right?
But timing is everything. There will perhaps never be a better opportunity to write a populist article demanding the final removal of the Indian skipper from a format to which he is so apparently unsuited and cares so little about, forget that his patient 99 probably helped stave off a 3-1 loss. Ms Ugra learnt this the hard way the last time her ego got the better of her and she wrote a scathing piece on Dhoni for the unspeakable crime of not showing up for a press conference... which he had no obligation to turn up to in the first place. My my, he left a few journalists waiting for what they mistakenly assumed was obligatory instead of customary, what a scumbag! We'll tell all our fans on cricinfo and they'll demand his head... except, they didn't and the article drew such a vicious response (India were a pretty good team back then, and we didn't care about Dhoni not attending a press conference at another boring Sri Lankan series) that it was pulled from cricinfo's front pages within minutes and relegated to the nether pages, so hard to find a couple of hours later that I need to use exact search strings on google to find it.
Nor is Ms Ugra alone among those who've used India's downfall to trumpet their vindication for doubting Dhoni, almost all exclusively in hindsight. Mohinder Amarnath drew scorn for claiming he wanted to sack Dhoni as captain but stayed silent and decided not to as selector and instead what's he doing, write a book on it? I'm a mere spectator, and like many in the audience I love watching a champion make a comeback from the brink, and there will be fewer victories sweeter for me if Dhoni is able to silence these critics once and for all. Its not that they matter or that they are worthy opponents, its the wave of adversity that he's facing because he has chosen to treat many of the sports journalists in this country for what they are, unlike a few who have become media darlings because of carefully managed and cultured relationships with these two-faced hounds who swish their pens around hoping their jabs will win them plaudits, rarely thinking about the consequences of their influence and responsibilities while demanding the same of those whom they criticize.
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