Dhoni: made for ODIs

venuszone.....

It is as a one-day batsman and captain that he finds his best expression

Harsha Bhogle

It was 119 for 4 when Mahendra Singh Dhoni walked out to bat in Kochi. Ordinarily, Indian supporters might have been tense, given the scoreline; the fingernails might have been chewed, and India's recent one-day record might have been in danger of being pummelled further. But the man on his way out seemed to bring a sense of calm with him. He was in good form, of course - possibly the only one in the side in any form at all - but there was an inevitability about his performance. Dhoni calms nerves in one-day cricket, and there is little doubt that in the era after Ganguly, Dravid and Tendulkar, he is India's best limited-overs batsman.

It is just as true, though, that at 190 for 5 in a Test match he doesn't quite give you the feeling that all is well. His batting numbers in Test cricket are not bad - in the pre-Gilchrist era they would have been considered excellent - but he doesn't seem to control the game in quite the same way. And while Dhoni the Test player is good (average 38), Dhoni the one-day cricketer is a giant. You would worry, for example, if India had to bat him at No. 6 in a Test match; you wouldn't at all if he were a permanent No. 5 in the one-day game. Indeed, that is where I am convinced he should bat, because it provides the right balance between him playing as many balls as possible and ensuring he is in when the last few overs are being bowled.

Having said that, at six he evokes feelings similar to those Australian supporters will have had with Michael Bevan, and it is an interesting exercise to compare numbers and, indeed, to realise how similar they are. Bevan has 6912 runs from 232 games at 53.58, Dhoni 7215 from 216 at 52.28. It could be argued that they are beneficiaries of the many not-outs that invariably come when you bat No. 6, though batsmen who play in that position would be just as entitled to argue that they are not guaranteed as many deliveries as a No. 3, for example. But if you take away the not-outs and do a straight runs-by-innings calculation, Bevan gets 35.26 to Dhoni's 37.38.

As an aside, that demand to take away the effect of not-outs comes largely from top- order players, and I have heard it stridently argued by one such Australian cricketer, who thought players like Bevan liked the not-out rather too much and that therefore players like him were more valuable in the second innings than in the first, where the desire to stay unbeaten could result in fewer runs for the team. (When you have been around for a while you realise that the genesis of most points of view lies in where a particular player's numbers are strongest!)

So then, on to No. 6 itself, where Dhoni at 43.47 might seem to lag behind Bevan at 56.71 - until you look at those innings where batsmen have been out (which, I must admit, is not a clinching argument). Here he does 26.17 to Bevan's 27.94. The Bevan camp might say Dhoni didn't enjoy batting in South Africa (21.70 from ten innings), and that would be countered by the Dhoni camp (Bevan in Sri Lanka: 27.28 from 20 innings). (In fact, Dhoni's numbers in South Africa are part of a larger trend that shows the batting averages of all Indian batsmen take substantial dips in that country).

	I believe Dhoni has something of an attitude that allows him to enjoy the one-day game more than a Test match, or indeed more than a T20. Witness how he sneaks overs in from part-timers, lets a bowler go all ten at a time, lets his instincts run

Interestingly Bevan never became a force in Test cricket, though he scored Sheffield Shield runs by the bagful. There was talk that he didn't like the short-pitched ball, though he must have got plenty of them in first class cricket in Australia. I rather think he was more suited to the one-day game, where his hit-the-gap-and-run-hard style was so effective. Dhoni too, till he unfurls shots later in the innings, is a jabber, a streetsmart batsman who gives you the impression he is in a boxing ring sometimes: jab, punch, defend, defend, jab...

I also believe it is something of that attitude that allows him to enjoy the one-day game more than a Test match, or indeed more than a T20. Witness how he sneaks overs in from part-timers, lets a bowler go all ten at a time, lets his instincts run. He makes no secret of the fact that he enjoys the one-day game. And in it he can get by some days with a weak bowling side, which he can't do in Test matches, where he can often spend an hour searching for a bowler. Don't forget that he never had access to the giant-hearted Anil Kumble, and that Harbhajan Singh seemed to be past his best most times when he bowled for Dhoni. You can see it is a combination that allows Test matches to drift at times.

So can we look elsewhere for a Test captain? Virat Kohli has only played 15 Tests, and it would be counter-productive to make him captain while he goes through a cycle of bad and good times. I fear there is a question mark over Virender Sehwag's long-term future, and while I hope that is dispelled quickly, it doesn't make giving him the leadership a sound long-term decision. And I think Gautam Gambhir needs to focus just now on being the batsman he can be without worrying about being the leader that he might be. So, you see, we've come to the end!

But there is one thing Dhoni can do. As some of us suggested (Rahul Dravid among them), giving up the T20 captaincy might be an option - not just the India job, those are too few matches to count, but the Chennai Super Kings one as well. That will give him two months of cricket to enjoy, allow him to look at the game in a different light, and give Suresh Raina a responsibility that I think he will grow into very well. It might be good for franchise and country.

Harsha Bhogle is a commentator, television presenter and writer. His Twitter feed.........

Blaming rotation is missing the point:Australia cricket

venuszone.....

It is wrong-headed to suggest that Australia's resting and rotation of players should be scrapped after their awful performance in Brisbane

As each wicket fell at the Gabba, as Australia edged closer to what nearly became their lowest-ever ODI total, the critics of the team's rotation policy found full voice. Commentators wondered if the side had been destabilised by all the changes, a question Channel 9's Mark Nicholas asked Michael Clarke after the loss. Twitter lit up with suggestions that after Lance Armstrong's display of faux contrition, John Inverarity would be the next to grace Oprah's couch and admit fault.

It was a pithy line but one that missed the point. And the point was that Australia's batsmen were undone by the most wonderful display of swing bowling from Nuwan Kulasekara and, later, Lasith Malinga. The three men returning from a break, Clarke, David Warner and Matthew Wade, were beaten by the quality bowling. But so were George Bailey, David Hussey and Phillip Hughes, all of whom had played both the first two matches, in Melbourne and Adelaide.

Certainly Australia's batsmen could have been more circumspect, but it's hard to think of many batsmen around the world who would have handled Kulasekara with ease on a day like this. He was hooping the ball so far from outside off to the stumps, it wouldn't have been surprising to find an industrial fan positioned at short cover. James Anderson will struggle to move the ball that much during the Ashes this year, even in the helpful English conditions.

That is not to say that Australia's batsmen will counter quality swing bowlers comfortably in their Test challenges. Time and again in the past few years the moving ball has been their undoing, as it was in their 47 all-out in Cape Town 14 months ago, and their 88 on the first day against Pakistan at Headingley in 2010. But with the exception of Hughes, who was squared up and caught at slip, few of the batsmen at the Gabba played the kind of strokes they would have in a Test.

And Test cricket is where Australia will be judged in 2013. Not in a five-match one-day international series against Sri Lanka that will be forgotten within a month. Without wishing to disrespect Sri Lanka, one look at Australia's hectic cricketing calendar makes it clear that this series and the upcoming one-dayers against West Indies are the best times to rest key men this year. And as much as some former players resent the idea, today's international cricketers need the occasional break.

Take Warner, for example. Until he was rested for the first two matches of this ODI series, he had not missed a single game for Australia, in any format, since his Test debut in the first week of December 2011. For the sake of neatness, let's consider his workload in the 2012 calendar year alone. He played 49 of a possible 49 games for Australia in that time, along with IPL and Champions League commitments.

Last January, Warner played Tests in Sydney, Perth and Adelaide. Then he had T20s and one-dayers in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, Hobart, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Eight days after the last of those games, he was in St Vincent in the Caribbean, about as far from Adelaide as is possible. He played limited-overs games in St Vincent, St Lucia and Barbados, and then Tests in Barbados, Trinidad and Dominica.

Less than two weeks later, he was in India for the IPL, playing in Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi, Dharmasala, Gahunje and Chennai. After the IPL he had the luxury of a fortnight at home before flying to England to play a warm-up game in Leicester, an ODI across the Irish Sea in Belfast, then back to England for a game in Chelmsford, and one-dayers in London, Durham and Manchester. Another short spell at home followed.

After that he had games against Afghanistan and Pakistan in Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah (again) and Dubai, then it was straight to Sri Lanka for the World Twenty20. His six games there were all in Colombo. It was about the longest he spent in any one city for the whole year.

Then there was the Champions League in South Africa, which he was contractually obliged to play in, and which took him to Centurion, Durban, Cape Town, back to Centurion and back to Durban again. One week later he was back in Australia to play a Sheffield Shield game in Brisbane before Test matches in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney.

	The selection panel saw an opportunity to give Warner a rest over the past week, during what frankly is one of the less important battles of the year, and they gave it to him. Likewise Clarke, likewise Wade

If that was exhausting to read, imagine what it was like to live through. At a rough estimate, Warner would have boarded a plane at least 70 times during the year. There are commercial airline pilots who will have flown less than he did during 2012. But that's the job, you say? That's why he gets the big dollars. True. But money doesn't make him any less susceptible to fatigue.

Inverarity and his selection panel saw an opportunity to give Warner a rest over the past week, during what, frankly, is one of the less important battles of the year, and they gave it to him. Likewise Michael Clarke, who in any case had carried a hamstring niggle through the past three Tests and must surely have benefited from such a break. Likewise Matthew Wade, who in 2012 played 46 of a possible 49 games for Australia.

It is worth noting how close Warner and Wade were to the record number of international matches ever played by an Australian in a calendar year. That figure is 51, set by Michael Hussey in 2009. In the pre-T20 era, the only men at such a level were Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, who each played 50 games in 1999, a year that featured a World Cup, Test tours of West Indies, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe, and the usual home summer ODI tri-series.

But bear in mind that in the following year, 2000, Australia's schedule was pruned significantly and they played only 31 games and had four months off in the winter. There is no such luxury for Warner and Wade in 2013. If Australia reach the final of the Champions Trophy in England in the middle of the year, the team will play at least 47 international matches in the calendar year 2013, plus individual commitments such as the IPL and Champions League. The reality of cricket in this era is that those tournaments must be factored in.

Between the ongoing one-dayers, a Test tour of India, the IPL, the Champions Trophy, the Ashes, ODIs in England, ODIs in India, and another Ashes series at home, the gaps on the calendar this year are even harder to identify than they were in 2012.

Did Australia lose one-day momentum by resting Warner, Clarke and Wade? Perhaps. But that is vastly preferable to such men being mentally and physically exhausted when they set off on next month's four-Test tour of India. It should be noted they will need to fly to India within a week of the end of the limited-overs series against West Indies.

When the cricket calendar is that packed, players could be forgiven for forgetting their addresses. Giving them a week at home at this time of year is not much to ask.

Dhoni's success formula in ODIs:

venuszone.....

His tendency to hit the ball straight, and his ability to play the waiting game, have been the keys to his superb run as an ODI batsman in the last 20 months.

Plenty has gone wrong for MS Dhoni in the last 20 months: India have been thumped in overseas Tests, and then lost some more at home too; his captaincy moves have been questioned; and his batting form in Tests has been pretty ordinary - 958 runs in 33 innings at 33.03 - and those stats were propped up by home runs against New Zealand and West Indies. There's one aspect of his game, though, that has remained untouched by all these recent debacles - his ODI batting has been quite spectacular recently, even if all his runs haven't led to victories.

Since the end of the 2011 World Cup, Dhoni has played 27 ODI innings, scored 1166 runs, and averaged 83.28 at a strike rate of 92.39. The average has been helped along by 13 not-outs, but even allowing for that, these are amazing numbers: in these 27 innings he has gone past 50 on 11 occasions, and scored a century when coming in to bat at 29 for 5 in seaming conditions against a potent Pakistan attack. He has guided the team when wickets have fallen around him, consolidated during the middle stages of the innings, and been there during the slog overs, performing each role to perfection.

There has been criticism about him batting too far down the order at Nos. 6 or 7 - he has batted higher only three times during this period - but it can also be argued that he has given the specialist batsmen in the team the best opportunity to build their innings. That he has been left with so much to do is a damning indictment of the lack of form of the top-order batsmen. In these 30 matches that Dhoni has played, he has scored 16.38% of bat runs scored by all Indian batsmen, a pretty high percentage for someone who bats outside the top five in the 50-over format.

Dhoni is one of 11 batsmen to score more than 1000 ODI runs during this period, and while his average is easily the highest, only Suresh Raina has a higher strike rate among these 11.

Batsmen who have scored 1000+ ODI runs since May 2011

Batsman	Innings	Runs	Average	Strike rate	100s/ 50s
MS Dhoni	27	1166	83.28	92.39	1/ 10
Virat Kohli	41	1997	55.47	89.79	8/ 8
Alastair Cook	32	1355	46.72	85.59	4/ 9
Kumar Sangakkara	44	1751	41.69	75.15	3/ 11
Gautam Gambhir	30	1098	37.86	83.30	2/ 9
Suresh Raina	40	1183	35.84	94.94	0/ 10
Mahela Jayawardene	43	1426	34.78	81.67	1/ 12
Mohammad Hafeez	35	1176	34.58	72.19	3/ 6
Tillakaratne Dilshan	48	1500	33.33	81.92	4/ 7
Dinesh Chandimal	43	1215	32.83	74.53	1/ 9
Upul Tharanga	38	1044	28.21	73.10	1/ 9

The table below demonstrates how cleverly Dhoni paces his innings in an ODI. He has often spoken about the importance of not going for big shots too early in the innings, and of holding back the charge till as late as possible; the numbers below show he practises what he preaches. In the 419 balls he has played during the first 30 overs of an innings, Dhoni has scored only 245, a run rate of 3.50 per overs. He has played out 250 dot balls during this period (60% of the total deliveries he faced), but has been dismissed only three times. Most of his runs in this time have come in singles. The break-up reads thus: 130 ones, 23 twos, and a three, with only 66 runs coming in fours or sixes.

Between overs 30 and 40, his run rate goes up, but not by all that much, to 4.05 per over. Out of 367 deliveries, he has played out 210 dots (57%), and has still scored mostly in singles and twos (119 and 14), with only 88 runs coming in fours or sixes. Between the 41st and 45th overs, the dot-ball percentage drops to 42 (97 out of 229), while the scoring rate also goes up to very nearly a run a ball. However, even during this period he has generally resisted the temptation to cut loose.

It's only in the last five overs that he has completely broken the shackles, striking the ball to all parts and scoring at nearly 11 runs per over. In this phase of innings, 60% of his runs have come in fours or sixes, and his dot-ball percentage drops to 22. It can be argued that he sometimes leaves the onslaught for too late, but Dhoni has the numbers to back his method.

Dhoni and the art of pacing an ODI innings (since May 2011)

Overs	Runs	Balls	Dismissals	Average	Run rate	4s/ 6s
0-30	245	419	3	81.67	3.50	12/ 3
30.1-40	247	367	5	49.50	4.03	16/ 4
40.1-45	227	229	2	113.50	5.94	14/ 7
45.1-50	447	247	4	111.75	10.85	43/ 16

	Dhoni's wagon wheel shows he has scored plenty of runs in front of the wicket.

Dhoni's scoring methods also indicate he has worked out his percentages well. Of the 1166 runs he has scored since the last World Cup, 810 have come in front of the wicket (nearly 70%), while 334 have been scored in the V between mid-off and mid-on. On the other hand, he has scored only 86 in the V behind the wicket - between third man and fine leg - which shows his preference for playing with the full face of the bat, rather than attempting cute angles. He has also struck more than 50% of his sixes (16 out of 30) in the V between long-on and long-off, with 12 more coming in the midwicket region. (See wagon-wheel graphic.)

His scoring patterns against different types of bowlers also shows his inclination to play the percentages. Against right-arm spin, Dhoni has scored at only 3.88 runs per over, but he hasn't been dismissed even once. He has played some high-quality offspinners during this period - Saeed Ajmal (36 runs off 77 balls), Mohammad Hafeez (48 off 72) and Graeme Swann (77 off 99) being the main ones - and Dhoni has been sensible enough to respect their skills, preserving his wicket so that he is around to take advantage of other, weaker bowlers. (It's an approach that a batsman like Virender Sehwag would do well to adopt.)

Against left-arm spin, too, Dhoni has been pretty circumspect, scoring 40 from 70 balls off Xavier Doherty - who is also the only spinner to dismiss him in ODIs during this period - and 13 from 27 off Rangana Herath. Against Samit Patel, whose skills as a left-arm spinner aren't in the top league, Dhoni has scored more freely, taking 59 off 58. His overall scoring rate against spin is also relatively low because spinners bowl primarily in the middle overs, when Dhoni's main focus is usually on preserving his wicket.

The quicker bowlers have gone for more runs, though right-arm seamers have also dismissed him 13 times. Tim Bresnan has dismissed Dhoni three times - the only bowler to do so - but has also gone for 99 runs in 79 balls (7.51 runs per over). Jade Dernbach has conceded 95 off 100, but has dismissed Dhoni twice, while Lasith Malinga's two wickets have cost him 68 off just 53 balls. The bowler who has struggled the most against Dhoni is Steven Finn, going for 85 from 59 balls, without ever dismissing him.

Most fast bowlers will fancy their chances against Dhoni in Tests, especially overseas, but in ODIs Dhoni has tackled them pretty effectively. Batting outside Asia remains a tricky issue for Dhoni - he averages only 33.13 in chases outside Asia, compared to 63.89 in Asia - but given his current form, he is India's best batting bet in ODIs regardless of the conditions.

Dhoni against each type of bowler in ODIs since May 2011

Bowler type	Runs	Balls	Dismissals	Average	Run rate	4s/ 6s
Right-arm pace	757	713	13	58.23	6.37	73/ 15
Right-arm spin	200	309	0	-	3.88	2/ 9
Left-arm spin	113	156	1	113.00	4.34	1/ 3
Left-arm pace	96	84	0	-	6.85	9/ 3