MSD: The Setting of a Yellow Sun
What now for the King of Super Kings, and more notes from IPL 2025
John Cheever once wrote: ‘I’ve been homesick for countries I have never seen, and longed to be where I could not be.’
To me that’s a kind of nostalgia, a cousin to the Portuguese idea of saudade, the yearning for something that no longer exists or perhaps never existed. It’s true in cricket as in life, the search for a time or place that is unreliable in the memory but faithful and real in emotional terms.
The remnants of MS Dhoni’s playing greatness, the slender threads that connect him to the past, are being carefully held by Chennai Super Kings, but there’s an Ozymandias feel to the entire endeavour. An age is over. It’s just that no-one wants to admit it yet.
A report on ESPNCricinfo rated Dhoni just below Tendulkar and Kohli as India’s most revered cricketer of the modern era, but Tendulkar and Kohli are something different. Theirs is a greatness fulfilled. It was somehow always there waiting for them, they simply needed to inhabit it. Dhoni’s was never so pre-ordained. He was the railroad ticket collector whose name got misspelled and never changed back, who came out of a talent spotting programme aimed at kids that Indian cricket might not otherwise have found, who said that he wanted to be a soldier as much as a cricketer.
There are other worlds with other Dhonis, alternative realities in which they made it and he didn’t, and he’s still out there on a train somewhere, smiling and punching tickets. Such is the nature of chance, fate, sliding doors. Dhoni arrived with his motorbike and his mullet like a character out of Kerouac to become India’s calmest captain, their most potent matchwinner. So often, he was stillness at the heart of mayhem. If the batting of Kohli and Tendulkar was Patrician, to the manor born, Dhoni’s was hand-stitched, home-made. He played like a man who hadn’t watched other people play, but brother did he play...
It was his luck to coincide with the birth of the IPL as a symbol of the new India, and no single player has the hold on the competition that he has. The most expensive buy in the first auction, he has complied a record that matches the dominance of individuals like Woods in golf or Djokovic in tennis: winner in 2010, 2011, 2018, 2021 and 2023, and perhaps just as impressively, runner up in 2008, 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2019.
The former ticket collector is an honorary officer in the Indian Territorial Army parachute regiment, a vice president of India Cement. He owns football and hockey clubs, produces films, endorses product. His is a benign cult of personality, a love both pure and ardent. The Chennai crowd want their own wickets to fall so that he can bat.
Given all that, how could they bear to let him go now? And how can he walk away? His coach Stephen Fleming admits that he can no longer bat for significant periods, and the certainty he once injected into the veins of his team has now become the opposite. If CSK can’t make a decision about Dhoni, then how can they decide anything else? Professional cricket is supposed to be ruthless, not ageless.
And yet they are kept together not just by the needs of sponsors and TV contracts but by that nostalgia, that yearning, that saudade. What is it that they actually want 43-year-old MS Dhoni to do? The answer seems to be, become ten years younger. They are asking for the past to repeat itself so they can see it happen one more time and feel all those old feelings once again.
Dhoni has become a sun that is too bright to stare directly into – and how do you go on without the sun? As CSK fall apart, that unique co-dependence is why he is still here.
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Harry Brook has been named England’s white ball captain. Apparently there was a brief dither while Key and McCullum fantasised to one another that Stokes could somehow do the 50-over job (a touch of the Dhonis about that daydream) before giving both to Brook. His other rivals weren’t actually in the team (well, neither is Stokes for that matter), so as Bazball appointments go, this one was against type in its predictability.
But given it has been on the horizon for a year or so, why is Harry Brook not playing in the IPL?
There is lots of stuff about rest and workload, but if that’s the case, rest him for the meaningless bi-lateral fixture-list fillers that dot the summer. The IPL is the one place that Brook might actually learn about the job under an intensity that comes closest to a World Cup Final. It’s a vast international information exchange that can’t be replicated anywhere else. Its frame of reference and network of connections is wide and far-reaching. It should be unmissable for an emerging captain.
Is this more English exceptionalism, believing once again that we know best and can take or leave the IPL? Or does Brook not really fancy India, where he has had his struggles? Either way, it makes no sense.
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No sooner had I written something in the last notes about Jofra Archer completely losing any ability he ever had (or something) he is firing, and so are Rajasthan. It’s yet another example of the class is permanent maxim, but I think also that bowlers generally have come back into a competition that was shaping as an unprecedented runfest.
After week one KG Rabada said that the sport should be renamed ‘batting’, but life in the IPL comes at you fast, eh KG? Even the Royals, everyone’s bet for deadbeats, are rampaging up the table - well, above CSK and Mumbai, anyhow.
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Tom Banton made 371 for Somerset in their first Championship game against Middlesex the other day. Worcester had been bowled out for 154 and when Banton went in, Somerset were 39-3 so it was all pretty regulation. But after that, the Somerset innings stretched on for a total of 149.4 overs before Worcester batted again and made 485-9 from exactly 200 overs. Add the 45.3 overs for which Worcester batted the first time, and you have almost ten games of T20 cricket contained in a single draw in the first-class game.
Imagine the fielding that went on. And on. And on.
I don’t know why but for the first time, I felt that the end of long form cricket might one day come. What kid born into today’s world will be drawn to a game that exists for days when everything else flits past in hours, if that?
And Banton only hit two sixes, come on. Who does he think he is, Dom Sibley?