Joy Bhattacharya, former Kolkata Knight Riders team director, recently revealed that legendary India captain and current BCCI president Sourav Ganguly had described MS Dhoni as a ‘chabuk batsman’ during the latter’s maiden India tour of Bangladesh in 2004.
Ganguly, who brought a revolution in Indian cricket, is a great judge of talent and there is no doubt in it. He always backed the young talents and laid the foundation for India's greater future at the highest level.
The former captain also gave a lot of match-winners to India and Dhoni is among other legends like Virender Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan.
MS Dhoni also made his international debut under Ganguly when he was picked for the Bangladesh tour in 2004 after his successful tri-series show against Pakistan A and Kenya A.
However, the Indian selectors weren’t much sure about Dhoni’s selection, as there were other options available, but it was Ganguly who had trust in the latter’s talent and picked him for Bangladesh ODIs.
Unfortunately, Dhoni failed to live up to the expectation in Bangladesh, but still, Ganguly backed him in the next series against Pakistan and decided to promote him to no. 3 batting position and the Ranchi-born power-striker lived up to his captain and team’s expectations and since then he never looked back.
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Bhattacharya said at the 22 yarns podcast of Oaktree Sports hosted by Gaurav Kapur uploaded on Spotify and Youtube: “I remember being on a flight to Bangladesh in 2004 and Sourav was just telling me ‘we have this chabuk new batsman’. ‘Chabuk’ means whipped. He said ‘chabuk new batsman’ who has come out. You have to see him, MS Dhoni is going to be a star’.”
He further added, “One thing he was just fantastic at was that he would just see you and he would know the talent. If you have the talent, he would back you. It didn’t mean that you could not get runs, you could fail, it didn’t matter to him. Because he knew on the day you had the ability to score.”
Bhattacharya signed off by saying, “Look at Yuvraj, look at Sehwag. You know what he does to Sehwag. He turns around and says to him ‘look the middle order is too crowded. If you want to play for India, you have to open. There is me, Tendulkar, Laxman, Dravid... where are you going to get a chance? Yuvraj Singh did not get a chance for so many years because the middle order is crowded. Go and open’. And what happened was that Sehwag opened and the history was made.”
(With Hindustan Times Inputs)
