MS Dhoni burst onto the scene as a dashing wicketkeeper batsman during the period of 2004/05. At that time, the Indian cricket team in ODIs had Rahul Dravid as the makeshift keeper. Dravid had kept wickets from 1999 to 2004 and he had a great record, smashing 2300 runs at an average of 44 with four centuries and a strike-rate of 72.6. Such was Dravid’s success as keeper that Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly’s team composition did not suffer and the batting was given plenty of depth. Rahul Dravid played some classy knocks as a keeper in ODIs but such was the brilliance of MS Dhoni that he immediately replaced Rahul Dravid as the keeper of the side despite Dravid’s brilliant record. Now, former BCCI chairman of selectors Kiran More has revealed an interesting anecdote on why MS Dhoni was the preferred replacement for Dravid.
“Rahul Dravid had already kept in 73 One-day Internationals, so we were looking for a wicketkeeper-batsman who could whack the ball and we could give Rahul a respite. There was surely something special about the way he approached the game. We picked him for India A to Kenya, where he had a good tour and scored over 600 runs. We already had players like Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh but when MS Dhoni came, he was a complete package and took the Indian cricket by storm,” Kiran More told in an interaction with former India batsman WV Raman on his podcast ‘Inside Out’.
The arrival of MS Dhoni changed the fortunes of the Indian cricket team that was struggling in the period of 2007. When MS Dhoni took over as the captain of the Indian cricket team for the World T20, the likes of Sourav Ganguly, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid stepped aside as they wanted to give the youngsters a go. The move paid off and India won the World T20 under MS Dhoni to establish themselves as the dominant force in world cricket.
Under MS Dhoni, India soon became the No.1 Test side and more glory beckoned when India won the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup and also the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy, making MS Dhoni the first and only captain in cricket history to win all three major ICC trophies. MS Dhoni recently announced his retirement on August 15, 2020 and that brought an end to his 16-year international career.