"Dhoni backs his players; Ponting was so competitive", Michael Hussey rates different captains 

Hussey played 79 Tests, 185 ODIs and 38 T20Is for Australia and turned up in 59 IPL matches.

MS Dhoni and Ricky Ponting | TwitterFormer Australia batsman Michael Hussey assessed the captaincy styles of different leaders he played under at the international and domestic level. 

Hussey, who was a late bloomer in international cricket, turned up in 79 Tests, 185 ODIs and 38 T20Is for Australia, most of those under Ricky Ponting before Michael Clarke took over in the latter part of Hussey's career. 

Read Also: You should never write off champions like MS Dhoni, says Michael Hussey

The left-hand batsman, known as 'Mr Cricket', also featured in 59 matches in the Indian Premier League (IPL), where he was first led by Mahendra Singh Dhoni for Chennai Super Kings (CSK) and then by Rohit Sharma for Mumbai Indians (MI). 

Hussey feels grateful to have played under leaders of such great quality, as he pointed out their strengths in a podcast called Hotspot with Chetan Narula.

"They are all very different characters," said Hussey. "Ricky Ponting was so competitive and led from the front and backed his players 100%. He wanted to win so badly and dragged the whole team along with him."

Under Ponting, Australia dominated world cricket, across formats and conditions. The team may not have tasted as much success when Clarke took over, but an ODI World Cup title in 2015 and Ashes whitewash at home are worth their weight in gold. 

"I would say Michael Clarke was very tactical and very good brain on the cricket field, knew when to bowl certain bowlers and things like that," said Hussey. 

Hussey played six seasons of IPL for CSK under Dhoni's great leadership, which has overseen three successful title campaigns in the league's history. 

"MSD… he has a great intuition for the game but he is also very calm and cool, backs his players enormously and shows a lot of faith in them."

Rohit Sharma's story as captain of Mumbai Indians (MI) is also one of how that influenced his growth as a person and player, something Indian cricket shall feel thankful to the franchise for, as he is now among the best batsmen at the highest level and is also a successful vice-captain of the Indian side. 

"Rohit was much the same. He is very calm under pressure and tactically very sound as well. All of them had this ability to take pressure off players and I think that was a good thing," said Hussey on Rohit, under whom MI has won the IPL title four times. 

Lastly, on being asked to compare the leadership styles of Dhoni and Ponting, Hussey said: "Whether the team is going really well or going poorly, they are just consistent and calm with their personalities. Ricky, for example, whether he scored a hundred or scored a duck, he was just the same person."

"MSD, whether won four games in a row or lost four games in a row, he is exactly the same person. I think that is a very good attribute to have from a leadership point of view and it rubs off on everyone else on the team."

"If you have an emotional character as captain who is always going up and down, the team rides those waves with the captain, but if a captain is control and calm, and consistent with his personality, then that really helps the team," he concluded. 

 
 

By Kashish Chadha - 15 Jul, 2020

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