Two of the fifty

The fourth-wicket partnership at Kingsmead reached fifty from fourteen balls.

Yuvraj Singh had scored 50 of them. MS Dhoni had scored 2.

Who was captain

Dhoni was. He was twenty-six, leading India in the first Twenty20 World Cup, in a format the senior players had declined to tour for.

He came in at number four when Gautam Gambhir was caught at 144 in the sixteenth over, and he was still there at the end, ten not out from eight balls.

Yuvraj came in at five, after him.

Full scorecard: England v India, ICC World Twenty20, Durban, 19 September 2007 →

What that means in practice

A captain who promotes himself above the man who then scores 58 from 16 has made a decision that did not work. The innings is also remembered as the greatest hitting in the format’s history.

Both of those are true at once. Dhoni faced eight deliveries in a Twenty20 international and hit no boundaries at all, at a strike rate of 125, in an innings where his partner struck at 362.

He also, from the non-striker’s end, ran two singles that Yuvraj did not have to run, which is what the number 2 in that partnership actually represents.

The over

Stuart Broad bowled the nineteenth. Yuvraj hit all six deliveries for six.

Dhoni stood at the other end for the entire over and did not face a ball. The strike did not rotate because there was nothing to rotate: every delivery went out of the ground.

It is one of very few overs in cricket in which the non-striker’s presence was completely irrelevant to what happened, and the captain of India was the man performing it.

What the top order had already done

Virender Sehwag made 68 from 52 and Gautam Gambhir 58 from 41. Their opening stand was 136 inside fifteen overs and India were 144 for two when Dhoni arrived.

The match was already comfortable. Nothing that happened in the last three overs was necessary, which is part of why it is remembered as an exhibition rather than a rescue.

The rest of the tournament

India won it.

Dhoni captained the side that beat Pakistan in the final five days later. That win is generally treated as the moment Indian cricket changed shape. The IPL followed within a year.

His tournament with the bat was modest. Yuvraj’s was extraordinary and is the thing anybody can describe.

The captaincy is what people credit Dhoni with, and rightly, and the scorecard has no column for captaincy.

What England did next

They chased 219 and made 200 for six. Nobody in their top seven failed. Five of them passed twenty and the opening pair put on 53 inside six overs.

It was a competent chase of a total that only existed because of one over, and India won by eighteen runs, which is exactly half of the thirty-six Yuvraj took off Broad.

Two

It is a genuinely difficult number to interpret.

Two runs while a stand goes to fifty in fourteen balls admits three readings. A man who could not get the strike. A man refusing it. Or a man watching the best six-hitting of his lifetime from fifteen yards and deciding, correctly, to stay out of the way.

Dhoni has never said which. He has said almost nothing about that over in nearly twenty years, which for a cricketer as thoroughly interviewed as any in the sport’s history is its own kind of answer.

The card gives him 10 not out and gives the man at the other end 58 from 16, and the note on the fourth wicket reads: 50 runs in 14 balls, Yuvraj Singh 50, MS Dhoni 2.

••••••

No. 4 in The Other Guy, a series of 24.

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