M.S. Dhoni's last act in the World Cup was to collar Nuwan Kulasekara into the stands over long-on.
Four years on, as he prepares for his next game in the competition, it is not exactly in the same exuberantcircumstances. Dhoni, though, refuses to let the past – a week, a month, or a year old – intrude on his present. The 2011 triumph was a “proud moment” and would remain “until the time we are alive”, he said on Saturday, but it was something “that we don't really need to revisit again.”
This is a fresh tournament and the last World Cup or this last season are to be forgotten. “If you think that we lost the first Test (against Australia) and we keep taking the burden forward from there, then by now I would probably have been under the dressing table, the pressure becomes that much,” he said, on the eve of Sunday's meeting with Pakistan at the Adelaide Oval.
“It’s very important that you take the learnings and the mistakes that you have made forward with you.(But) to take a lot of burden forward isn’t beneficial because as it is, there is a lot of pressure.” Dhoni went beyond the platitudes to admit that India-Pakistan wasn't just another game. “However much we may say that it is the same as any other match, it is a little different. But we try to make sure that that difference is as nominal as possible,” he said.
Skipping to the present, Dhoni conceded that his fast bowlers, under harsh criticism for their poor performances, needed to improve. “Where we drastically need to improve is in not bowling easy boundary balls in the first ten overs, when the ball is new and the batsmen can actually use your pace. That will be the key factor,” he said.
India's 5-0 record over Pakistan in World Cups was brought up pretty quickly, only for Dhoni to dismiss it out of hand. “It only means that you have to answer a lot of questions regarding that. We are talking about a span of 20 years maybe or even more. The format has changed, the players have changed, and the way the game is approached has completely changed. It's just something nice to talk about. I don't think it really has any impact on the game,” he said. Dhoni really will have no truck with history.
