There has been a sharp fall from the pinnacle of the Test world and MS Dhoni obviously needs to shoulder much of the blame for the seven consecutive overseas defeats under his leadership © Getty Images
Regardless of what MS Dhoni achieves as captain, his detractors always tend to dismiss his triumphs as products of luck.
Arunabha Sengupta takes a scientific look at the supposed luck factor, discusses why this group-think persists.
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We must believe in luck. Else how can we explain the success of those whom we don’t like? –Jean Cocteau, French Writer & Filmmaker.
If one contrasts Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s captaincy record with his wide reputation as destiny’s favourite child, Cocteau’s words strike home with as much panache as the Indian skipper’s helicopter shot.
Two World Cups, a climb to the top rank in the Test cricket tables, rare Test series victories in win-barren lands, pioneering drawn Test series in South Africa and the first three-nation tournament triumph in Australia – carelessly cast aside as the easy virtues bestowed by a promiscuous Lady Luck who has allowed an undeserving skipper to grope her assets.
True, there has been a sharp fall from the pinnacle of the Test world – and Dhoni obviously needs to shoulder much of the blame for the seven consecutive overseas defeats under his leadership (the last Test in Australia was led by Virender Sehwag). But, if defeats result in criticism, it is grossly unfair to write success off as chance – especially a truckload of glittering achievements.
What does science say?
Luckily for analysts – and causing momentary unease to critics before scientific arguments are drowned in the babble of bigotry – there are numerical ways to validate whether the allegation of luck holds water.
What we need is to perform categorical data analysis, comparing Dhoni’s captaincy record with the rest of Indian captains after 2000 (the watershed mark of the fortunes of Indian cricket), and determine whether there is any statistically significant luck factor.
To do this, let us look at how the team has fared under the captaincy of Dhoni others from 2000, in Tests and ODIs. To keep the analysis unbiased, we do so after removing matches against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, because in Statistical terms these two countries skew the results.
India’s record in Test matches since 2000 (excluding minnows)
| Under Others | Under Dhoni | Total | |
| Win | 24 | 15 | 39 |
| Loss | 27 | 10 | 37 |
| Total | 51 | 25 | 76 |
| p-value | 0.14 | ||
The above table gives us a result scientifically known as p-value. The associated 0.14 measure means that the confidence with which we can say Dhoni’s leadership records are significantly better than the others after 2000 is 86%. This can be loosely interpreted as only 14% chance that the significantly better Test captaincy record was a result of pure chance.
If we do the same analysis for ODI’s the results are even more striking.
India’s record in ODIs since 2000 (excluding minnows)
|
| Under Others | Under Dhoni | Total |
| Win | 96 | 60 | 156 |
| Loss | 105 | 41 | 146 |
| Total | 201 | 101 | 302 |
| p-value | 0.028 | ||
The inference from this table based on a p-value of 0.028. This means that the confidence with which we can say Dhoni’s leadership records are significantly better is 97.2%. This can be loosely interpreted as only 2.8% chance that the significantly better ODI captaincy record happened by pure chance. This, by any academic standard, is overwhelming evidence in favour of Dhoni.
In both Tests and ODIs, the luck factor thus fails to make any sense in front of scientific analysis.
Adolf Hitler explains the ‘lucky Dhoni’ chant
However, if popular media and some former captains are anything to go by, more eligible leadership candidates for the Indian Test team seem to be popping out of every street corner these days. Be it Gautam Gambhir (batting average 20.21 in the last two overseas series), Virender Sehwag (batting average 19.91 in the last two overseas series) or Harbhajan Singh (bowling average 143.50 in the England series after which he has been omitted from the Indian team).
And even before this recency effect, it was almost concluded that MS Dhoni inherited a team prepared for him and then supposedly lived the privileged cricketing life as Indian cricket’s lucky charm. What is alarming is that this clamour about smiling fortune is not a recent rumour, but started doing rounds during the days of his World Cup campaign. At a time when his win-loss record in Test cricket stood at 14-3.
In previous articles, this writer has pointed some anomalies in this argument. Dhoni inherited the three pillars of Indian batting – Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman – when they were well into their mid-30s. The three had peaked simultaneously during 2000-2004 – way before Dhoni’s time. Anil Kumble, the architect of the highest number of Indian victories, bowed out as Dhoni took over the reins. The ageing of the middle order has been seen as the main reason of the failure of the team in England and Australia, and the lack of spin-power is a growing concern.
Besides, Sourav Ganguly’s 21-13 captaincy record in Tests owes a lot to nine wins against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. Without the minnows, Ganguly’s win loss ratio comes down to 12-12 in Tests and 45-60 in ODIs! Dhoni has had only a negligible substratum of this multi-layered cushion of luxury that Ganguly enjoyed because of minnow filled cricket calendars.
Why then do people tend to be swayed into the Dhoni fable of fortune?
One possible explanation is perhaps cognitive dissonance of a horde of fans who could not deal with MS Dhoni reaching peaks that some others did not – and the zealous fervour of these fans is legendary. Selective perception had to be indulged in to create a satisfactory world view of what transpired in the World Cups, in the ICC Test rankings and so on. . I’m sure recency effect and selective perception has stopped a lot of the critics from recalling the Test and series victories referred to at the beginning of the article.
The next step was the creation of group-think aided by the trait Adolf Hitler outlined in Volume 1 Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf. It formed the basis of his holocaust campaign and was famously paraphrased as ‘If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.’
Sadly, this technique of discrimination, at the expense of scientific facts and ethical truth is still played out in the variously motivated world of fandom.
(Arunabha Sengupta is trained from Indian Statistical Institute as a Statistician. He works as a Process Consultant, but purifies the soul through writing and cricket, often mixing the two into a cleansing cocktail. The author of three novels, he currently resides in the incredibly beautiful, but sadly cricket-ignorant, country of Switzerland. You can know more about him from his author site, his cricket blogs and by following him on Twitter)
