READ ALSO: 'Dhoni got emotional after breaking news to team'
Instant cricket has deluded us into believing what we see is the just and now; but it is in the longer form that time matters and asks questions of you.
The stellar figures will not reveal why you should go into a series, only to quit it midway?
READ ALSO: Dhoni's decision to quit midway surprised BCCI
What immense service would you be doing your struggling team and to the sport back home, when you join the team one Test late, lose the second inside four days after posting a 400 plus score in the first innings and then announce your retirement via that wonderfully fool proof instrument of the official press release. Not a word given, not one taken.
Dhoni's action is not one born out of those latter-day post-liberalisation norms that scoff at all tradition. It was delivered with supreme arrogance for everybody involved -the fans, his teammates, even if we least deserve it, the media and the sport itself.
READ ALSO: MS Dhoni takes the highway, Mahi way
It is the same arrogance that has been symptomatic of the Dhoni-Srinivasan era and its hold over the game. To say Dhoni's ways have been his own and this was no different, is belittling the efforts of the other men in his team. If you want to do things your way and don't expect your actions to affect your mates, don't play a team sport, play tennis instead.
A leader only quits midway when he cannot quell the "unrest" in the dressing room or his own form, is so woeful that there is no alternative but to give yourself the boot. Ask Kim Hughes. Having lost the dressing room, the Aussie skipper famously left a press conference in tears as he quit citing his inability to stem his team's slide in 1985. He betrayed the tough as nails Aussie persona and somewhere, he still just doesn't belong.
Dhoni had no such problem, cricketing that is. If anything, his casual brushing aside of the alleged Virat Kohli-Shikhar Dhawan spat only reinforced the idea how he was firmly in command. It was the typical Dhoni play of words that has usually had the touring media party eating out of his hands.
Yet, on Tuesday, if reports from Melbourne are to be believed, a chatty Dhoni reviewed the Boxing Day Test at length but chose to omit the crucial bit about his quitting the format in all capacities. At some level, it was the supreme convenient truth - don't tell if you are not asked. But in doing so, Dhoni approached it with the manner reminiscent of his batting -not just awkward but lacking in grace.
It beggars belief that it was in the time-lag of a quarter hour between the press conference and the arrival of the BCCI press note that Dhoni decided to call it quits. There was a clear window of nearly two months between the Australian tour and the truncated West Indies ODI series that Dhoni had to mull over his future in Tests for India.
Even if the BCCI was hell-bent upon pushing the reluctant cricketer to continue helming the team Down Under, he could have walked away earlier and no one would have questioned given his stature.
Dhoni will be credited as the man under whom India reached No. 1 in Tests, but with the free-fall that followed, he will also be identified as someone who not only failed to halt it, but casually walked away midway. One Test still to go would probably be the greatest number finally attached to his name.
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