Captaincy is about leading the players at your disposal as well as you can. No matter what you do, if you don’t have good players, you won’t be able to win matches.
The only way you will be called a good captain is if you win, and not for anything else. My belief in this school of thought has become stronger watching the two new teams – Gujarat Lions and Rising Pune Supergiants – in operation.
While Gujarat are at the top of the points table, Pune are fighting to keep their hopes alive. The difference in captaincy that people talk about between Suresh Raina and Mahendra Singh Dhoni is just a reflection of the quality of players in both sides.
Raina has quite a few players under him who are firing on all cylinders. When your top order scores runs, your lower order batsmen chip in with useful innings and your bowlers are generally on target, then the captain also looks good. And similarly, any team that is at the bottom of the table is there because of the lack of performances from all players.
We saw that at Chennai Super Kings, Dhoni was on top of the world. His team would invariably make it to the playoffs, and the team won the league twice. But now the situation has changed. The team that Dhoni led for so long was disbanded and the players he has at the moment are good, not great.
Now Dhoni doesn’t have the services of Kevin Pietersen and Faf du Plessis. The injury to Mitchell Marsh has added to his woes. However, Dhoni can look at the situation in a positive way.
With such big names out of the picture, those on the fringe will get a chance and you never know, you might get a match-winner. Until now, Dhoni has handled his team well, including Ravi Ashwin.
Raina: "It (captaincy) has been good. I have been lucky to play with MS (Dhoni) and learnt a lot from him"#RPSvGL #IPL2016
— Cricbuzz (@cricbuzz) April 29, 2016
There is some chatter about Dhoni not utilising Ashwin properly and relying on the inexperienced Murugan Ashwin. I feel Dhoni was correct in bowling Murugan up front because early on the pressure is less. Ravi can always be relied upon to bowl in the latter stages of the innings. So Dhoni decided to give Murugan extra cushion by bowling him at the top.
However, it’s not a hard and fast rule and we have seen the senior Ashwin taking the ball ahead of Murugan of late.
The one area where Raina is definitely ahead of Dhoni at the moment is batting. Raina has more than 200 runs to his name, better than Dhoni (146 from eight games).
Batting position is a factor as Raina is mainly a No. 3 player. But Dhoni has been promoting himself up the order and with Faf and KP not in the team, he will have to bat high and we might now see more runs from the skipper.
Kings XI Punjab have made a change in leadership with Murali Vijay taking over. We had to shake things up. While the openers were giving us decent starts, the rest of the batting order was not capitalising on it. We have not gone beyond the 160-170 mark and that is something the players need to address.
Ideally, the pressure of captaincy should not affect a batsman but it does happen. Maybe with the leadership responsibility taken away from him, David Miller can concentrate on his batting and hopefully play with freedom.
