Timeless and helmetless, MS Dhoni gears up for one final chase at a time when he has never divided opinion so strongly

Column: Delighting his fans and infuriating his critics, one of India's modern sporting icons is revving up for a final tilt at glory

MS Dhoni whipped off his helmet and led India to victory in Adelaide, even as his nation doubted him (Getty)

The lid has come off. Of course the lid has come off. One of the things about getting older is that your habits start to become crutches. Once upon a time it was just the mug you liked, your Sunday afternoon stroll, your favourite chair. Now it’s “who used my mug?”, “not now, I’m having my stroll”, and “GET THE LIVING F--- OUT OF MY CHAIR”. So as Adam Zampa arrives to bowl his gentle leg-spinners, Mahendra Singh Dhoni reflexively slips off his batting helmet and stares him down, eye to eye.

It’s a rakish throwback, effortlessly cool. Or it’s pure affectation, style over substance. This is one of the other things that happens when you get to a certain age - and this applies especially in sport, and especially in a sport as scrutinised and overheated as Indian cricket. After a while, whatever you do loses the power to change opinions, and merely validates them. Dhoni is 37 and has been doing this for 15 years. If you haven’t made up your mind about him by now, you never will.

Some believe Dhoni is increasingly becoming a liability to the Indian team. He doesn’t play Test matches any more, and so when he arrived in Australia at the start of the year he hadn’t played any sort of cricket in more than two months. In the first one-day international at Sydney, with India chasing 289, he scored a rusty, glacial 51 off 96 balls. By the time he got out, the required rate was 8.4 an over. It was a match-losing innings.

They say his powers are on the wane. That he doesn’t rotate the strike enough, and even when he does score runs, he makes things harder for his colleagues by eating up time. In the second ODI at Adelaide, he scored an unbeaten 55, but really it was Virat Kohli and Dinesh Karthik at the other end doing the damage. Now, in the decider at Melbourne, with the series level at 1-1, he’s dropped first ball at point. They say he’s out of form.

India need 59 off 53 balls. In his pomp, it’s the sort of chase Dhoni would have consumed as a light snack and washed down with a bottle of Pepsi bearing his image. Now, as he reaches his 50 off 74 balls, he seems to be stuck. Zampa returns, and unbelievably, Dhoni blocks out five consecutive dot balls. “What the f--- is Dhoni doing?” asks @Avant77 on Twitter. On the CricViz win predictor, Australia edge into favouritism.

MS Dhoni kicked into action against Australia late in proceedings - or maybe just on time (Getty)

On Australian television, the commentators are beginning to get bemused. Despite the best efforts of his batting partner Kedar Jadhav to raise the scoring rate, Dhoni seems to be making remarkably heavy weather of a modest target on a big ground. “He’s 10 from his last 17 deliveries!” cries Michael Vaughan on Fox Sports. “He’s having an evening net session!”

The asking rate creeps towards nine an over. “The only way Dhoni would realise how s--- Dhoni is,” writes @RKM79, is if “Dhoni has to bat with Dhoni.”

Outside the National Electronics store in Mumbai, a small crowd is gathering around one of the display sets, in expectation of fireworks. Meanwhile, Dhoni waits, makes them wait. When he’s in this sort of mood, it’s almost as if he can pause time. And in an age where time seems not to tick but to pound relentlessly, in a world of T10 and unimaginable totals and advanced analytics and going hard from ball one, in a world of permanent connectivity and two blue ticks and Marie Kondo and getting tempura delivered to your front room, perhaps there’s no greater act of apostasy than to take all the time you want.

Have you ever taken a train in India? The crowds, the chaos, the sheer heaving throng of humanity. When he was a teenager, Dhoni used to work on the Indian railways checking tickets. The trouble is, when you’ve got hundreds of people crammed from wall to platform, you can’t possibly check them all. So you have to pick your targets carefully. You scan the faces. You follow the movements. Which ones look a bit shifty? Which ones seem like they’re trying to edge away, out of your line of sight?

When he’s in a run chase, Dhoni picks his targets with a similar surgical precision. With four overs remaining and 33 runs to get, Dhoni consults umpire Michael Gough. He wants to know how many overs each Australian bowler has left. Zampa has bowled his ten. The dangerous Jhye Richardson has one left. That means the three others will be bowled by the inconsistent Marcus Stoinis and Peter Siddle, who isn’t having the best night. Time to move.

There are times in a run chase when you think you have Dhoni on the ropes. He’s out of nick, he’s out of boundary options, he’s not connecting, he’s not bothered. And then, like he does here, he simply moves into theatrical mode. He rejects a drink and reminds Jadhav to rehydrate. Do as I say, not as I do. He wanders down the pitch between every ball to keep his partner focused. He steps across the crease just as Siddle is running in, forcing him to stop. The last three overs have taken almost half an hour. The time hangs like heat.

A vanquished Peter Siddle shakes hands with Dhoni as India defeat Australia (Getty)

Is there a batsman on Earth who toys with time like this? Even in the 2011 World Cup final, an innings best known for Dhoni’s extraordinary late blitz, he began as if he were playing a first-morning seamer at Headingley. He blocked his first seven balls, was 12 off 23, didn’t score his first boundary for almost 10 overs, played himself in, got comfortable. It seemed like the epitome of risk-free cricket, but in fact what Dhoni was doing - what he has always tried to do - was gambling. The gamble being that if he takes the game deep, your nerves will crack before his.

Now Stoinis is bowling, and Dhoni marches down the wicket and smashes the ball with every last gram of power he can muster, and it’s all Aaron Finch can do at mid-off to get his hands to the ball to drop it. Now he gets down and laps the ball through square-leg for four. Now he drills it down the ground for four more. Now India need one from seven balls. Now the crowd are singing his name. Now the smiles come. In a twinkling and a twirl, India have won the series, and Dhoni has won it for them.

As he picks up his player-of-the-series trophy, he looks once more the dashing, diffident throwback. There was a time when ‘MS’ bestrode Indian cricket, but this isn’t his team any more, either in name or in shape. This is Kohli’s team now, and it’s brash and bold, fearless and restless. They don’t spend 50 balls getting themselves in. They don’t want to drag things out. They want to get things done.

And even Dhoni’s moment of triumph will only stave off the circling vultures for so long. He was dropped first ball. He was dropped on 72. Even his fabled reputation as a finisher has taken some knocks in recent years. Critics point to his 1990s-esque strike rate of 81 since the last World Cup, the alarming decline in his numbers in 2018. They say Dhoni is still a viable option in modest chases, but in an age of 300-plus scores, he’s more hindrance than help. Others argue that a player as talismanic and influential as Dhoni can’t merely be reduced to numbers.

This is a World Cup year. They say he’s hanging on, spent, almost done. They say the modern game is slowly leaving him behind, that India need to look to the future, that the exciting Rishabh Pant needs more chances. They say he’s a champion, a born winner, a sage and a leader, the sort of talent Indian cricket only turns up once in a generation. And yet all the while, oblivious to your bickering, here he remains still: gently ticking along, gently passing the time, gently staring you down.