Unlike a large majority of selections for the Indian cricket team, legendary captain MS Dhoni had not booked a berth in the national squad on the back of scoring truckload of runs for years in domestic cricket. Instead, his USP was his ability to play an aggressive brand of cricket laced with hard-hitting shots, which was a rarity back in the time.
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As a result, Dhoni was fast-tracked from one level to another as he seldom failed to let go of game-changing opportunities. Although quite a lot of his success is very-well pictured in his biopic titled ‘M. S. Dhoni: The Untold Story’ (2016), a life-changing moment for him was to play in Duleep Trophy 2003/04 final.
9 Months Before India Debut, MS Dhoni Had Received A Life-Changing Opportunity To Play In Duleep Trophy Final
Contested between five zonal teams namely North Zone, South Zone, East Zone, West Zone and Central Zone and a rare sixth team in England A, this first-class competition had witnessed the presence of a host of star players such as Kevin Pietersen, Yuvraj Singh, Gautam Gambhir, Ashish Nehra, Parthiv Patel etc. in addition to Dhoni.
While the group stage matches had taken place in Gurgaon, Dharamsala, and Amritsar, the grand finale between East Zone and North Zone was played in Mohali.
During an interaction with legendary West Indian pacer Curtly Ambrose via a YouTube channel named ‘The Curtly and Karishma Show‘ a couple of years ago, former team India wicket-keeper batter and former selector Kiran More had remarked how the team was looking for a wicket-keeper batter post ICC Cricket World Cup 2003, and Dhoni was apparently an apt man for the role.
Impressed with a certain knock off his bat wherein he had scored some 130-odd runs out of his team’s total of 170, More was adamant to have the boy from Ranchi play the Duleep Trophy 2003/04 final as East Zone’s wicket-keeper batter.
In order to have his wish fulfilled, More held talks with former India captain Sourav Ganguly and East Zone’s first-choice wicket-keeper batter Deep Dasgupta to allow Dhoni a place in the Playing XI for the final. It is worth of a mention that Dasgupta, having played 13 international matches across formats until then, had kept wickets in both the group stage matches for East Zone before the final match.
Ganguly, who had later promoted Dhoni in another key phase of his international career, had made him open the batting. Although Ganguly didn’t play the match, he could’ve easily had a say in East Zone’s such strategic decisions back then.
“My colleague saw him [MS Dhoni] first, then I went and saw him. I especially flew down and saw him get 130 runs out of the team’s total of 170. He smashed everyone. We wanted him to play in the [Duleep Trophy 2003/04] finals as a wicket-keeper. That’s when we had a lot of debate with Sourav Ganguly and Deep Dasgupta. It took about 10 days to tell Sourav and his selector to ask Deep to not keep wickets, and to let MS Dhoni keep wickets.
“Dhoni kept wickets, he smashed Ashish Nehra and all the bowlers from North Zone and then we sent him to Kenya for the triangular series involving India A, Pakistan A and Kenya.”
While Dhoni returned back with the score of 21 under his name in the first innings, he smashed a quickfire 60 (47) with the help of eight fours and a six in the second innings. East India, however, had lost the final to North India by 59 runs.
Kenya Triangular Tournament 2004 All But Confirmed MS Dhoni’s International Debut
As mentioned above by More, Dhoni then arrived in Kenya to partake in the Kenya Triangular Tournament around five months later in August 2004. The tour had turned out to be path-breaking one for Dhoni with respect to his career. He had emerged as the highest run-scorer in the series with 362 runs across six innings at an average of 72.40. He had smashed two centuries and a half-century, all of them against the Pakistan A side led by Misbah-ul-Haq.
“MS scored about 600 runs and after that rest his history. Dhoni had all the package to become a match-winner. It was only a matter of time before all of them clicked together. It’s like gambling, you need to gamble on the right horse. We gambled on the right horse and that day he won the race for us,” More further added.
Four (nine from Duleep Trophy match) months later (December 2004), Dhoni went on to play his maiden international match during a three-match away ODI series against Bangladesh in Chattogram.
