Mahendra Singh Dhoni has at least one more attribute to go with his "strong physical and mental abilities of a small town player," that of being brutally frank even if his remarks are made with a benign smile. If his pleasant public demeanor is a mere façade then he has to be a brilliant actor.
When a captain says his team’s fielding in Nagpur was the best the team could muster, he was either saying that their best is not enough to challenge a team like Australia or asking fans to accept his team as it is and not build castles in the air about their invincibility just because they have won the world Twenty20 championship.
He, however, didn’t look all that chirpy after his bowlers also batted for the side to win the seventh and last One-Dayer in Mumbai. All he could reiterate was that his gut feeling about the ability of Murali Kartik as a match-winner was vindicated.
Then the blinder, his first as captain: "I want players who, if I ask them to, will stand in front of a truck," he was quoted as saying. Does it mean his truck will run over those who do not fall in line!
What he, however, did not say or should have said was that even with their failings and inadequacies in the field the team had done reasonably well, both in England and against the Australians at home. With a little luck and with energetic push, backed by better stratagems, they could have put it across their opponents.
In England, the Indians should have won the Test series two-one if not two-nil considering that they were outplayed in the first Test at Lord’s, the rain saving them when they were on the brink of defeat, and they could have won the One-Day series three-two if not four-one.
If they had not messed up after winning the toss at Vadodara they would have been two-two and three-two at Nagpur had they seized the excellent opportunity to win the high-scoring match to arrive in Mumbai as favourites to clinch the series. It is not to suggest that it was all hunky dory for the Indians. The fact is that they were not as bad as the 2-4 score line makes them out to be, it could have been the other way round as one look at the way the Indians lost the matches from a position of strength would show.
In the series opener in Bangalore, Australia were allowed to wriggle out from a precarious 90 for 4 to post 307. In Kochi, the visitors were 66 for 3 and they still managed 306 and in the third match at Hyderabad they had a healthy 290 after losing three wickets for 100-odd. India won in Chandigarh batting first.
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