Was Dhoni correct in playing for a draw?
At first glance, almost everyone who has an opinion on cricket will disagree on this. Not in the spirit of the game, killing test cricket, putting personal glory first blah blah and all that crap.
Firstly, this match was anyway robbed of much of it’s potential due to frequent delays on account of the weather and light conditions, and in terms of overs lost, almost an entire day’s play was wiped out.
Dhoni is a frank and forthright guy and is not afraid to speak his mind. If he had spoken more about the weather playing spoilsport, the need to safeguard their 1-0 series lead etc, not many would have raised such a hue and cry. I think he erred by being too frank in actually saying that they had decided to declare after Gambhir and Yuvraj had got their individual centuries. As an internal team decision, that was fine, but talking about it didn’t exactly show him in a glowing light, considering his reputation till now as an attacking captain.
To get back to the decision itself, I think it was pretty ok and we’ve been at the receiving end of similar bloody mindedness from other countries as well; there have been numerous instances where India have held the upper hand and the other team has employed tactics to play for a draw, denying us a chance to level / win a series.
Our bowlers’ fitness levels have also been a bother after a tough series against Australia and now England, so there was no reason for Zaheer, Ishant and Harbhajan to have a go at the Englishmen in a dead match and risk needless injury at this point.
Another problem is the huge pressure from the cricket mad public, and of course, the media. If Dhoni had declared earlier and allowed England a sporting run chase, and IF England had actually won, the debate over this decision would have reached epic proportions, reducing the present one to a lark. TV channels would have gone overboard, calling for Dhoni’s head, having stupid SMS polls asking viewers to respond, and of course each channel parading its so-called “expert” like Saba Karim, Maninder Singh, Ashok Malhotra, Surinder Khanna, and asking the question, “Kya Dhoni ne theek kiya?, Kya Dhoni ko aisa karna chahiye tha?” et al. We probably wouldn’t get to see this kind of hysteria being whipped up in England or Australia if the reverse were to happen.
To get back to the point about Test cricket being killed, I think the biggest culprits are………. the bunch of nutcases that make up the BCCI panel that is responsible for drawing up the tour schedule !!!
It beats me why these worthies insist on allocating matches to cities without taking location and climate into consideration and only think about “quotas”. Some recent examples:
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Everybody is fully aware about weather conditions in North India during the winter. Why schedule matches at places like Guwahati and Jamshedpur, or even Mohali?
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The India-Australia Test at Bangalore in October is another case in point, as it usually rains in Bangalore at that time of the year due to the retreating south-west monsoon.
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Time after time, we’ve seen tours of Sri Lanka being scheduled right in the middle of the monsoon. So many India-Sri Lanka matches are full of instances where rain has either disrupted some part of the match or even the entire match itself !
So if anyone is to be blamed, it’s the BCCI !! 
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