MS Dhoni and the useless one shots I like to come up with

Trickery and Betrayal

I was going to include this in the plans I had for writing on the 2007 England tour, cuz it is one of my favorite series ever, but this was a little maybe disconnected from that so I just wrote it here. It is just one of my favorite random one shots, very fitting with the title, and very fun to think about. Because think about it, Rahul's decision to resign from captaincy during the first match Mahi was playing as captain, forced BCCI to look beyond the result of the tournament and choose him as the ODI captain regardless of whether he won or lost. It meant that the result which plays such a heavy role in the board supporting or not supporting a captain, no longer held that weight. And it made them scramble around and panic, which you know is always satisfying. And yes I know I keep bringing up Yuvraj not being in the Test team one of the primary reasons why Mahi was looked at ahead of Yuvraj. I still feel that that is one of the reasons why, apart from ofcourse Sachin Tendulkar's recommendation.

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Rahul had known what was coming. Infact he had already prepared a meticulous damage control plan. He had carefully overseen the timing, he had sorted out any uneven bumps, and well everything had gone exactly as he had wanted it to. All except one thing and that was ofcourse the one man who was as far from conventional as possible in every way, unpredictable at the finest. It was ofcourse a certain Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

Rahul had made up his mind to quit captaincy way before they had even landed in England. He couldn't do it anymore, the politics, the outside noise, the sheer stupidity of officials and how can he forget to mention, the respectable media of India. It sucked all the pleasure out of his game, he could no longer enjoy his strategies, he couldn't play his game without feeling like there was a boulder tied to his ankle, trying to drown him in the sea of his own heartache. Rahul wasn't an allrounder, he wasn't something very special, he was perfectly ordinary. One thing he was good at was at seeing the truth of his strengths and weaknesses and currently, captaincy was weakening him. He was good at strategies. He was NOT good at this kind of pressure, he did not have enough political sense to know how to deal with people of power and maintain his own standing. He wasn't Sourav, he had had no idea how to put them in backfoot. And then he suddenly did.

It had first come from his growing discontent of his role. Captaincy came to him in the most ugly manner, the start itself had been so horrible, he didn't know why he had hoped for betterment. Then for a while things started looking up, they started winning more often, there was always something amiss but it was harder to look for mistakes after victories. It wasn't any easier to spot them when they started loosing. He couldn't really grasp where he was going wrong. And then they started winning again, but the feeling that something was amiss never went. And he only realized what it was after they crashed and burned at the World Cup. Way too late. Captaincy of India wasn't just about the field, it was about the politics. The Board was forever money hungry and wanted results, didn't care about culture of the team and were never above using players, especially the captain, as pawns or scapegoats. They hadn't even lost the Cup, they had lost a match. A single match. The public went wild. He had seen some of it coming, their South Africa tour had seen somewhat of an overreaction too. But this was something else altogether, public did not care who they were damaging, who they were hurting, if there were people inside the house they were setting fire to, they were angry way beyond they had any right to be; they had not even lost the Cup then. Months ago he had schooled Mahi for making his displeasure at the fickleness of public known, months later he was regretting not joining the kid and publicly denouncing it more. While their safety and their homes were attacked, the BCCI, the ever dedicated Board whose first job was looking after the players, had chosen to take a backseat and enjoy the show. He could only grit his teeth and watch as he and his boys were the scapegoats once more, pawns to their games once more.