Dhoni pops Ganguly in vote as India’s greatest captain by a wafer-thin margin
Image : Collected
|| Desk Report ||
Former Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni passed through its predecessor Sourav Ganguly as India’s greatest skipper by a little margin in a survey.
Two skippers were resolved on eight parameters which were developed by Star Sports show Cricket in association with ESPNcricinfo. The duo had conducted the survey to celebrate the birthdays of two of India cricket team’s greatest leaders on the cricket field, Dhoni and Ganguly.
The likes of Graeme Smith, Kumar Sangakkara, Gautam Gambhir, Irfan Pathan and Kris Srikkanth, were some of the players involved in conducting the survey. The results were announced in the recent episodes of the show.
Ganguly scored higher than Dhoni in four categories — captaincy away from home, transformational effects of captaincy on team, success of team handed over to the next captain and overall impact.
Dhoni scored more points in the four categories of captaincy at home, ODI captaincy, titles won and performance as a batsman while captaining the team. The difference in points between the two greats came down to decimals.
“The biggest difference between Dada’s captaincy and MS’s captaincy is MS, the player for me. I think in that middle order, the ability to close games, win games, finish games in that calm that he brought to the people around him. I think for me, that is probably the biggest difference between the two heroes, is MS Dhoni,” former South Africa captain Graeme Smith said.
“If Dada had an MS type player, his team was slightly more developed; I think you would have seen him win plenty more trophies. Dada was blessed to play or not blessed to play in an era where Australian cricket was at the forefront and dominating the world game as well which at the time the team had won the most during that period,” he added.
“You can be judged on a lot of things but sometimes you have to leave something behind and I think in that sense, Dada did a lot to create a wonderful legacy for others to inherit and MS benefitted from that,” added former Sri Lanka skipper Kumar Sangakkara.
“Obviously, both these guys have taken Indian cricket forward, but just purely from an impact point of view, I can only talk about MS Dhoni because he was very serious about taking Indian cricket forward,” said former India opener Gautam Gambhir.
Smith and Sangakkara chose Ganguly over Dhoni in terms of Test cricket but were willing to have Dhoni as their skipper in the limited-edition of cricket.
