Indian Cricket Captain MS Dhoni is likely the only player who had achieved enormous recognition for India. Probably, Dhoni is the only person who had an equal number of cricket fans and haters. He is hated by many people and also admired by many fans. Since his debut match, Dhoni had a wonderful cricket career especially as Captain who changed the whole Cricket environment in India.
According to the records, MS Dhoni is the only Captain who took his team to win all formats of the World Cup Championships such as 2007 ICC World T20, 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup and 2013 ICC Champions Trophy.
Dhoni is the only Indian Captain having won more Tests and ODIs than any other Captain. Despite his successful career as the India Captain and as a player, Dhoni has been criticized over the years due to some reasons. Here are few reasons why MS Dhoni is hated by many people in the cricket world. The first and foremost reason that strikes in everyone’s mind is that Test record overseas.
1. Poor Test Record Overseas as Captain:
Dhoni was handed over the Test Captaincy responsibilities in 2008 from Anil Kumble. As MS Dhoni won the 2007 T20 World Cup, BCCI has decided to elect Dhoni as the New Captain after Anil Kumble. Dhoni had seen huge success in the beginning in few home series against Australia, New Zealand and few other teams. These wins made India take the first position in Test rankings.
But Dhoni failed to continue the form in Overseas. India lost Test series in England, Australia and South Africa. Thus, this made him retire from the longest format of the game in Australia. Dhoni’s last series was against Australia down under which India again lost the Test Series.
2. Keeping Senior Players Aside:
Since Dhoni became the India Captain, lot of youngsters were given a chance to play for India but this resulted in seniors losing their place from the squad. Except Sachin Tendulkar, most of the seniors were dropped from the future ODI series. After 2011, World Cup, Gautam Gambhir, Zaheer Khan, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh and Virender Sehwag didn’t get opportunities in their further matches.
This situation became the road for youngsters with emerging talents had been selected through their performance in the IPL. Thus, this was the other reason why Dhoni had haters.
3. Preferring CSK players into the Squad:
This was the main reason why Dhoni had haters. They point out saying that Dhoni always prefers to give the chance to CSK players despite their performances. There is no doubt that IPL has emerged few exceptional Indian talents in these years with players like Yusuf Pathan, Stuart Binny, Ravi Ashwin, etc. Dhoni’s success as the Captain made no one question him about the selecting the CSK players always.
4. Selecting players despite their poor performances:
Dhoni was well known of keeping faith in few players despite their poor performances. An example for this statement is star batsman Rohit Sharma. During the 2012-13 seasons, Dhoni backed the selection of Rohit Sharma and promoted him to the opener’s slot despite producing a string of poor scores. However, after those poor scores, Rohit replied with some outstanding performances.
Another player is Ravindra Jadeja. Dhoni had a lot of faith in Jadeja which produced very poor results. Jadeja was given many chances in India’s tours of New Zealand and England in 2014.
5. Dhoni’s Match Finishing Skill:
Despite Dhoni being considered as one of the greatest finishers, he has a lot of objections batting at the end of the match and stealing all the credits of the win. In 2011 World Cup, Dhoni finished the match with a huge six in style. The other occasion is in the tri-series (India, SL, and WI) final between India and Sri Lanka. Dhoni’s finishing ability has seen a steady decline over the last few matches.
Thus, these are few reasons why MS Dhoni had a lot of haters.