Michael Atherton takes a dig at Dhoni

[Bublu Bhuyan]

"With the dismissal of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who looks as if the time spent filming numerous television commercials has come at the expense of his batting form, India were wobbling at 5-187, chasing 261." Link: http://www.rediff.com/cricket/slide-show/slide-show-world-cup-2011-india-australia-ricky-ponting-atherton-yuvraj-tendulkar-ashwin/20110325.htm

[Homerus_Unus]

"With the dismissal of Mahendra Singh Dhoni' date= who looks as if the time spent filming numerous television commercials has come at the expense of his batting form, India were wobbling at 5-187, chasing 261." Link: http://www.rediff.com/cricket/slide-show/slide-show-world-cup-2011-india-australia-ricky-ponting-atherton-yuvraj-tendulkar-ashwin/20110325.htm

Well...his batting form has indeed been found wanting.

[Zelig]

Dhoni played a rash shot y'day :whack:

[Sid]

STFU Atherton

[King Tendulkar]

Jealous of the money.

[Homerus_Unus]

STFU Atherton

If only Dhoni could MTFU would Atherton STFU.

[Aaku]

:WTF: atherton :WTF:

[Ultimate_Game]

Come Wednesday Dhoni will shut a lot of mouths

[NareshK]

I have never seen him more nervous than during yesterday's match when he was batting. He tried to take a single when he dropped the ball right in front of his feet and Lee was running straight towards him. He got to calm down.

[Bublu Bhuyan]

The guy also seems to have a problem with Tendulkar. Here are some of his articles which proves my point -

Tendulkar, now just a comic hero

For many, one of the sub-themes of this year's World Cup was to be the farewell of a so-called golden generation. Some of the greatest players of the modern era came to the Caribbean in the knowledge that this would be their last hurrah - in the short form of the game at least. Already we have seen a tearful farewell from Inzamam-ul-Haq, and a stately, restrained retirement from one of the most under-rated players of that golden crop, Anil Kumble. Brian Lara has already announced that he will concentrate on Test cricket after the West Indies commitments in this tournament are over, and given the way they are playing, and the in-fighting that followed their latest defeat, that will not be long in coming. Glenn McGrath will head off to less demanding pastures when his tournament is done, and it is unlikely that we will see another World Cup featuring Adam Gilchrist, Shaun Pollock, Matthew Hayden and Muttiah Muralitharan. There are a few runs and wickets to keep the notchers busy there. But one name, possibly greater than all those mentioned, has kept his counsel. According to dressing-room reports, Sachin Tendulkar, not normally a man to open his heart too readily, shed tears in the aftermath of India's early departure, but nothing has come from the little master's mouth. Given the almost obscene attention that he attracts, that has been his way throughout most of his career. Say little, score runs and if things don't go well beef up security at the family home in Bandra, as was done this week. But the runs have dried up. The man with more one-day international runs than any other - a staggering 14,847 with 41 centuries - found himself impotent to prevent his team's demise. He seemed a peripheral figure, scoring seven and nought in the two defeats that condemned his team to early departure. In truth, Tendulkar's decline has been in evidence for a while, even to his normally adoring public. His dismissal in his last Test match in Mumbai against England provoked a round of boos, and recently in a Times of India poll 92 per cent of respondents felt Tendulkar should quit. Most pundits have remained silent - it doesn't do India's pundits much commercial good to be seen criticising Tendulkar - but one has been conspicuously tough. Ian Chappell writes regular columns in Indian newspapers and this week he cut to the quick. He challenged Tendulkar to ask himself why he was still playing the game, and that if he wasn't playing to help India win as many matches as he could, if he was only playing to improve his statistics, then he would be well advised to quit now. For whatever reason - fatigue, injuries, the goldfish bowl that is Indian cricket - the joy of playing has not been in evidence in Tendulkar's batting for some time. He is careworn, not carefree. But in the same week that Chappell questioned Tendulkar's future, another interesting press release came out of India. This time it was from Virgin Comics, who announced a tie-up with Tendulkar to create new super-hero, called Master Blaster, for comics, animation and games. Gotham Chopra, the chief creative officer of Virgin Comics, had this to say: "When two powerful brands like Virgin and Tendulkar collide, an iconic hero like Master Blaster is the result." Quite apart from the brazen hijacking of a sobriquet that has always been associated with Viv Richards, it gives a clue as to why Tendulkar might be around for a short time yet. The truth is that Tendulkar has been marketed as a brand for some time, advertising many of the biggest commercial names in India. There are many interested parties who are keen to see Tendulkar wearing India's colours for a while yet. I hope, like Ian Chappell, that he is strong enough, and independent enough, to make up his own mind. There are only two proper reasons to carry on playing: if you are good enough, and if you still love the game. Only Tendulkar knows whether that love is alive. Everyone else is painfully aware that, despite his new super-hero status, his powers are very much on the wane.

Okay, this was just after the 2007 World Cup, and probably well deserved by Tendulkar. Here's one more where he speaks of Brian Lara's greatness, but instead also drags Tendulkar and indirectly makes his point that he believes Lara to be better than Tendulkar -

Genius of Brian Lara hailed by Wisden

You don’t really want to remember great players like this: Brian Lara filling his boots, not with runs but dollars, in the fledgeling Indian Cricket League at a far-flung cricketing outpost on the outskirts of Chandigarh, the surroundings of Panchkula more scrub than stadium. Puffy-cheeked and short of inspiration is no way to remember the most instinctive, attractive batsman of his era, so it was slightly appropriate that he made a match-winning century for Trinidad & Tobago in an attempted comeback a few weeks later. In any event, he was denied the grand farewell to his international career that two other modern-day greats, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, were accorded last year in Sydney, with the Ashes in the bag and the public paying full homage. At the magnificently revamped Kensington Oval, Lara had the setting all right, but not the script to match. Responding in turns to Marlon Samuels’s confused calls for a single, Lara shuffled forwards, backwards and then finally towards the pavilion for the last time. For once, he was at the mercy of events, rather than controlling them. Even now, at the end of his career, Lara could not escape the intrigue and controversy that accompanied his cricket from the moment in Antigua in 1994 that he broke Sir Garfield Sobers’s world record for the highest score in Tests. For some said Samuels had been disillusioned about the way Lara as captain had treated him, and this was the ultimate payback. Others said the ****-up confirmed the deep malaise within the West Indies team, that not even the basics could be executed competently — a malaise, moreover, in which Lara was deeply complicit. All this was a pity. Quite how Lara could have come to evoke such visceral and conflicting opinions, at a time when West Indies were not exactly flush with talent, is one for West Indian cricket historians. For some in the Caribbean, those two developments — Lara’s ascent to greatness and the decline of the West Indies team — are interwoven; for others, he was simply unlucky with his timing, and the fact that he was a great player in an undeniably shabby side merely added lustre to his reputation. Some day, someone from inside the West Indies dressing-room will write the definitive tale. It should be quite a read, failure being more interesting than success. Lara’s quixotic impact within the four walls of the West Indies dressing-room is, anyhow, beyond the scope of this appreciation. Lara the batsman can be assessed objectively on what we saw, rather than what we did not see. And any fair-minded assessment could only conclude that he must be one of the finest entertainers to have played in this or any other era. For entertainment was the creed by which he lived as a batsman. Many talk the talk but Lara, undeniably, walked the walk. Records and statistics must have been important to him — how else does a batsman galvanise himself to score 501 in a county match against Durham? — but the means were never sacrificed to the ends. “Did I entertain you?” he bellowed to the spectators in the newly minted Kensington stand at the end of his last match. They cheered, but not loudly enough. “Did I entertain you?” he asked again. And even those in the anti-Lara camp could not deny it. It is the West Indian way, of course. If, broadly, batsmanship can be split into two schools — the roundheads and the cavaliers — then West Indies have always specialised in the latter. It is the main reason why West Indies cricket is so cherished beyond narrow international boundaries and why the current decline is felt so deeply and so widely. Cricket, put simply, is more fun played the West Indian way. It is to Lara’s great credit that, whatever the circumstances, he stayed faithful to that particular creed. Lara was in the tradition of great batsmen for whom the fundamentals were essentially self-taught, for whom technique was always the servant and not the master. His eye for the ball and his co-ordination were granted by nature, and nurture in Trinidad did the rest. With his brothers and the community of Cantaro in the Santa Cruz valley to sustain him, Lara’s upbringing may not have been as solitary as Don Bradman’s, but his early methods bring the Don to mind: for a stump and a golf ball substitute a broomstick and a lime or a marble. Such was his subsequent impact as a schoolboy batsman that Tony Cozier would write in these pages of his record-breaking spree in 1994 that “there was no real surprise among his countrymen — simply the feeling that his inevitable date with destiny had arrived rather more suddenly than expected”. This schoolboy brilliance did not, it must be said, extend to the Youth World Cup in Australia in 1988, when I first came across Lara as an opposing captain. Word certainly had it that he was special, but a combination of poor outback pitches and fierce heat (appropriately, James Boiling had a good tournament for England) made batting far from easy. With just one half-century in the tournament, Lara flopped. But within three years he was captaining Trinidad and had become the owner of a maroon cap. Two years later, he played his great innings of 277 at Sydney, described by Rohan Kanhai, no stranger to instinct and individuality at the crease, as “one of the greatest innings I have ever seen”. There was no looking back after that — only a question of how far he would go and how many records he would break. What, then, made him stand out? Four things, I think. Barry Richards once said of Garry Sobers that he was the only 360-degree player in the game. He was referring, I think, to his backlift and follow-through, which routinely travelled through a full arc. Lara might well be described so, too, not just for his backlift, which reached the perpendicular when he was “on the go”, but also for where he could hit the ball — if not quite 360 degrees, then as near as dammit. No other contemporary player, save perhaps Mohammad Azharuddin, could deflect the ball so finely and so powerfully with a turn of the blade and flick of the wrists. Lara had subtlety in an age of power and brute force. This unrestricted repertoire, the widest of arcs being open to him, and the ability to hit good balls to the boundary made him uniquely feared by opposing captains. You might worry about Adam Gilchrist, say, butchering an attack and smashing a bowler to smithereens, but Lara made captains, not bowlers, look silly. If you knew you were going to die, you’d prefer a single bludgeoning blow to the head, or a quick bullet to the brain, rather than death by a thousand ever-so-precise cuts. Eleven fielders were never enough; there were always gaps to plug. When he scored his 375 against my England team, I remember moving first slip out when Lara had scored 291. He edged the very next ball right where first slip had been. I’d love to know whether it was deliberate; I always doubted it, simply on the basis that such a level of genius was beyond my comprehension. Thirdly, Lara was undoubtedly the best player of spin in his era, an era that did not lack for world-class spinners. There might not have been such abundance of quality as before, but in Anil Kumble, Muttiah Muralitharan and Shane Warne, he came up against three of the greatest ever. No one has played Murali better than Lara in Sri Lanka in 2001-02. He hit 688 runs at 114 and reduced the maestro to impotency (against everyone else Murali was omnipotent, bowling Sri Lanka to a 3-0 win). It was no coincidence, perhaps, that it was against Lara’s West Indies in 1999 that Warne was dropped for the first and last time in his Test career. That series saw Lara at the peak of his powers, and his unbeaten 153 to win the Barbados Test is the fourth reason he stood out. Great batsmen play great innings, and on that day Lara created, I believe, the best innings I have seen either as player or observer of the game. England were watching in Lahore, where we were preparing for the 1999 World Cup, and no other contemporary batsman would have had the effect of keeping a bunch of professional cricketers glued to the screen until the small hours of the morning. It was a stunning innings. “Christ,” one of the team said to me, “I wish you’d get as excited by some of our players.” Well, honesty always was my downfall. Only one reason prevents this observer from placing Lara at the apex of modern West Indian batsmen. Against extreme pace he got hit too often, and he could seem extraordinarily jumpy at the crease. I’ve often wondered what kind of effect removing helmets would have on modern-day players, a hypothetical that doesn’t apply to Vivian Richards. Still, to hold both Test and first-class records for the highest innings, and thrill a generation of watchers in the process, is something Lara can look back on with a great deal of pride. Warne, assessing the cricketers he played against, was once heard to say that Sachin Tendulkar came first, daylight second and Lara third. That may be so. But who would you rather watch? The answer is not in doubt: a Lara innings was always a thing of beauty, no matter who the beholder.

And then one more piece -

'Calling Sachin best demeaning to others'

Sachin Tendulkar is a great batsman but to suggest he is the best ever is demeaning to those former greats who survived the bodyline series and stood at the crease without any modern-day safety gear, feels former England captain Mike Atherton. "To suggest that Tendulkar - or, indeed, any modern, armoured or, to use (Viv) Richards's phrase, "pampered" player - is the best ever is demeaning to those former greats who stood at the crease in the knowledge that their next ball could be their last," Artherton wrote in The Times. Atherton feels modern-day protections have made life easier for current batsmen compared to yesteryears and so it remains to be seen how Tendulkar's career would have shaped up if these gears were not available. "Images of Tendulkar have adorned newspapers and websites throughout the week. Images, mostly, of the 'Little Master' at the crease, compact and balanced. So compact and balanced, in fact, that Bradman said Tendulkar was the modern player whose method most closely resembled his own. "There was, though, one crucial difference, which the image of Tendulkar on these pages on Monday highlighted. Perched on top of Tendulkar's head ... was a bright blue helmet and a grille to protect his features. "Which is not to say that Tendulkar lacks bravery. Indeed, he proved his 'manhood' in his first Test series when Waqar Younis bloodied his nose and Tendulkar refused treatment and carried on batting," Atherton said. "He wore a grille from then on, though, so that when James Anderson sent a ball crashing into it at Trent Bridge in July 2007, Tendulkar was able to shake his head and carry on as if he had been hit with a wet sponge," he added. Atherton believes Tendulkar would be inconvenienced if he steps on the field without a helmet. "Tendulkar's method suggests that he would be little inconvenienced by not wearing a helmet. He does not hook, nor does he plunge on to the front foot. And he watches the ball like a hawk. "Nevertheless, would he have lasted as long, would he have scored as many runs, would that blow to his face by Anderson would not have affected his confidence in any way? We cannot know for sure. "Bradman's average plummeted in the Bodyline series, when the need for raw courage was added to the equation. A few modern players would suffer, too. "The ball is no softer now and the bowlers no less quick, but standing at the crease knowing that you can be killed demands a different level of courage from the realisation that you might just get hurt," he added.

[ShahidAfridi]

Atherton is a funny man :) Dhoni will be bowled over by Gul's inswinging indipping inbouncing yorker

[Cricketics]

it was some good fielding. I am not too concerned about Dhoni's batting. He will find or somehow manage to sneak India to victory whenever we would require him to do. I am happy with him scoring 20-30s at 6-7th position. I am more looking towards his captaincy, which has been pretty decent. He is the best man in India to lead the country. The best bat(tendulkar) recommened his name and so everything is perfect. COME ON DHONI.. CONQUER MOHALI AND WIN HEARTS AT BOLLGROUND

[Karan114]

What's with these English commentators always mentioning how many ads Dhoni does? When the UDRS/Bell controversy happened, David Lloyd said that Dhoni should read up on the rules instead of doing ads. Comment on his poor form or any captaincy errors etc., but wtf does it have to do with how many ads he does. Ponting has the highest number of endorsements amongst Aussie cricketers iirc, was his poor form recently because of them?

[Sid]

If only Dhoni could MTFU would Atherton STFU.

Okay

[Show_stopper]

Well putting Athers aside...Dhoni's form is cause of concern. This is really his first form blip since his debut in ODIs. The guy has consistently averaged 45+ every calender year after year. it remains to be seen if at all he will recover? Has his technique finally caught up with him? I think the commies were discussing the other day that he is averaging less than 24 (?) this year. Thats dreadful for a person who was ranked #1 batsman in the world for a long time.

[Zelig]

I hate MSD's PSPO ad, man. It looks lame :dontknow:

[DomainK]

That is a retarded statement. Atherton has played enough cricket to know that every batsman goes through these patches and ads have nothing to do with it.

[Bublu Bhuyan]

Apparently, he also believes that Indian fans are the most immature ones.

Indian fans are most immature: Atherton

Indian supporters are the "most immature" lot in the world of cricket and they should grow up and accept defeat as an essential part of the game, says former England captain Mike Atherton. Atherton said Indian fans need to understand that the team they support would not win everything. "It is time for Indian cricket supporters to grow up and accept defeat as an essential part of the game. Sport is not about winning; it is about losing. Trust me, we in English cricket know more about that than anyone," he said. "They will lose in various ways - some thrillingly, some abjectly - but lose they will. It is what makes the moments of triumph all the more special. "After all, if winning was all about there was, what would there be to celebrate? Indian supporters, the most immature in cricket, cannot seem to grasp this simple fact," he said. After India crashed out of the Twenty20 World Cup, fans in India have reacted with unbridled anger, burning Mahendra Singh Dhoni's effigy and questioning his leadership. Observing how the Indian fans tend to go overboard with their reaction to both success and failure, Atherton said, "So where once temples were erected in Ranchi for its most famous son, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, now effigies are burnt. Once the Army had to be called out because the mob had laid homage to a hair salon where Dhoni was having his luxuriant locks lopped off, but veneration has now turned to vituperation. "Burning effigies of losing captains on the sub-continent is nothing new, as Wasim Akram and countless others would testify. It was, though, more understandable at a time when Indian cricket was looking to flex its muscles," he said.

[Sachin=GOD]

@Bublu please stop posting articles written by this retarded guy.

[Bublu Bhuyan]

@Bublu please stop posting articles written by this retarded guy.

Was just trying to point out that maybe this guy has some problems with India. He has a history of writing such articles. Co-incidence, maybe? I think not.