The sword that made Dhoni cut him too

It wasn't hubris. It was never arrogance. It was just self-belief. Extreme self-belief that eventually proved to be his undoing.

Fourteen months ago, I was struck by a thought that really gripped me, so much that I wanted to write a book on it. My lofty ambitions were grounded by events of the following months where writing a book became the last of my priorities. But the thought never left me and in those grim days too, I kept engaging with it.

At the heart of it was a simple question - How does an athlete come to know or accept that his time with the sport is over? How do these individuals with immense self-belief and who are massively motivated and driven accept that their best days are behind them? The more I thought the more I felt that it's bound to be a deeply emotional decision for an athlete. In fact, it’s possibly the most emotional that gives them many sleepless nights.

After all, these are people who pretty much give their entire growing up years to a dream. To a sport that can turn out to be pretty cruel in the sense that it possibly won't give the athlete a fraction of what the athlete gives to the sport. But for any sportsman, I realized, the self-belief is the foremost source of the fuel that drives him. Hundreds cannot believe in him/her and it's all right but if the sportsman stops believing in himself, no amount of talent can save him from failing.

But there's this other side of this self-belief business which makes things a little tricky. It can often show you what doesn't exist anymore. And you're suddenly chasing shadows, that too of the past. Mind you, it's not hubris but just the other side of the same self-belief that makes the sportsman great. He/she still ardently believes that there's enough fuel in the tank for a final hurrah, or even a restart. This has resulted in quite a few undignified last stretches of glorious sporting careers that deserved better endings. While everyone believes the mojo is lost, the self-belief tells the sportsman that rediscovery isn't only possible but is around the corner. That, more often than not, proves to be the folly, though.

Over the years, that seemed to be the case with MS Dhoni. There's little doubt that not too long back he was the best finisher the game had seen. He had just the perfect temperament as well as the explosive batting for the role. He made that role his own, so much so that newer generations don't even know the name of Michael Bevan. And why not. His record is phenomenal and his method of taking it deep and then winning it with a flurry of boundaries with the calm and composure of a surgeon only added to the aura of Dhoni.

But then, as it so often does to a sportsman, age caught up with him. Post that hunting down of Eranga for 15 in the final over of the Celkon Cup tri-series in 2013, there hasn't been a single occasion when India has won with more than 12 required off the last over with Dhoni on strike, neither in T20Is or ODIs. In fact, post that, there have been more misses than hits. The problem with those misses was the evident self-belief (and not arrogance as one might like to call, for a sportsman of Dhoni's pedigree doesn't reach where he did on arrogance) that marked Dhoni's stint at the pitch in those matches.

In 2014, he denied Rayudu the strike in the final over of a T20I in England but didn't succeed in winning it for India. Most of us thought it to be a one-off instance and moved on. But then it repeated again against South Africa in 2015, against Zimbabwe in 2016 in Zimbabwe, against West Indies in West Indies in 2017. Those knocks were far and few between and were usually forgotten by people because of some blistering knocks that invariably followed them. The approach of taking it too deep and then launching in the final overs, though, did raise eyebrows, more so because the results of the approach began to dry up. The South Africa game, when India needed merely 11 runs in the final over, gave one of the first signs that Dhoni's reflexes were no more the same as Rabada's pace proved just too much.

But Dhoni's self-belief seemed to refuse to hear what his body was trying to tell him. For all that he had achieved with sheer determination, it was only fair for him to pay heed to his self-belief and not critics, who were shooting off the hip without even having lifted a bat, forget winning matches like him from impossible situations. The critics only made him stronger and he pushed himself harder to become the fittest 36-year-old cricketer the world had ever seen. The agility behind the stumps only confirmed that his reflexes were beyond questioning. However, in front of the stumps, the doubts never faded and were fanned by curious knocks against West Indies in 2017 and England in 2018 where his strike rate hovered around 50 despite playing more than a 100 deliveries. The fans began to expect lesser from him for he still was the rock of the middle order if not the same swashbuckler of the past. But Dhoni didn't.

Even at 38, he backed himself to score 30 off the last two overs. Whether he could have done it or not if not for the run-out, we would never know. But in the end, like so many times in the recent past, it proved to be a bridge too far. A bridge whose distance only Dhoni's self-belief had calculated in his head.

Anyone who had seen him bat in the last couple of years, or for that matter even this World Cup, would tell it was a remote possibility. Of course, time and again, he showed us nothing is impossible. But that's our emotions talking. Emotions that had seen him do it for several years but several years ago. At 38, scoring 30 off the final two overs was beyond a man whose only boundary had come in the 33rd over. In the 15 overs after that, he had failed to find a single boundary while Jadeja made merry.

Under no circumstances, Dhoni is to be blamed for India's loss. He tried his best and gave India hope with the Jadeja partnership but it's fair to say his calculations failed, as they've done on several occasions in the recent past. For his calculations relied a lot on a self-belief that in hindsight, can be called, misplaced.

Despite looking completely out of depth for much of the World Cup, he didn't fail India but probably was failed by his own self-belief. And, if the history of sports is anything to go by, he isn't the first great and surely not the last to have slipped on the tricky edge of this knife, which resulted in another not so happy ending to a great career.