Former India cricketer and coach Lalchand Rajput has an interesting take on ex-India captain MS Dhoni's leadership style. Rajput, who has observed Dhoni's captaincy closely, gave his opinion in a chat with Indranil Basu on Sportskeeda's Facebook page.

Rajput called Dhoni a mixture of two of India cricket's former captains, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. He feels the Jharkhand cricketer took some traits of captaincy from both the captains before leading the Indian side.

"To be honest, he was very very calm. He used to think two steps ahead because a captain has to make a decision on the ground... One thing I liked about him was that he was a thinking captain. He seemed to me like a mixture of [Sourav] Ganguly and Rahul Dravid... Ganguly was very very aggressive and thinking but was positive and thinking.

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"He [Ganguly] used to give players a lot of confidence. Ganguly was the one who changed the mentality of the Indian team and I think it was just carried forward by Dhoni... If Dhoni felt like a certain player had potential, he made sure he gave that player got enough opportunities."

Dhoni took over India's captaincy in 2007 and his first tournament was ICC T20 World Cup. India was recovering from a disastrous performance in the 50-over World Cup the same year and the veterans were not interested in playing the shorter format ICC showpiece tournament.

A young MS Dhoni led the team under the guidance of the then team manager Lalchand. India had no head coach and they were on their own. In everyone's surprise, the team did well and managed to lift the maidan ICC T20 World Cup title.

(WITH SPORTSKEEDA INPUTS)