MS Dhoni is hailed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, captain India has ever had, and as the most successful white-ball skipper. For India, Mahendra Singh Dhoni won all three ICC titles that were available to him to win – the 2007 T20 World Cup, 2011 ODI World Cup, and 2013 Champions Trophy – in addition to the Test mace and the number 1 Test ranking in the 2009/2010 season.
One of MS Dhoni’s mantras of success was to give players the security of their place in the side and back them to the hilt. Anyone who has played for a considerable amount of time under Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s captaincy has always praised Dhoni backed his players in whom he saw talent and potential and gave them a long rope.
Mahendra Singh Dhoni then groomed Kohli to take over his position. Kohli became the Test skipper in the end of 2014 and was given full-time white-ball captaincy job at the start of 2017. While India attained immense success in Test cricket under Virat Kohli, they failed to win an ICC title. And one of the criticism points thrown toward Kohli was that he was a bit impatient with players and sometimes dropped even some of the big names in the team.
Here are 2 senior players who were regulars under MS Dhoni but got dropped from the side by captain Virat Kohli:
Ravindra Jadeja
Since his comeback in the Test team in 2013, Ravindra Jadeja has been a regular and first-choice player in the Test side. And with his batting elevation in recent years, he’s become a proper all-rounder and plays in overseas Tests as well.
However, it is in white-ball cricket that both Jadeja and Ashwin’s credentials have been doubted time and again until a few years ago in 2019 when he cemented his place in the white-ball sides as well.
In 2017, after India’s loss in the Champions Trophy final, Ravindra Jadeja was slowly phased out of India’s ODI and T20I teams. First in the name of “rest”, both Jadeja and Ashwin were not picked by Virat in the white-ball teams, and only played Tests and were dropped from limited-overs sides.
After a year of absence, Jadeja managed to make his comeback in the 2018 Asia Cup and sealed his place with terrific performances. Since then, Jadeja has been an all-format first-choice player for India. But, in that 2017-18 period, between 2017 Champions Trophy and 2018 Asia Cup, it felt Jadeja would never play another white-ball game for India as Chahal, Kuldeep, and Axar made their mark.
R Ashwin
R Ashwin has been hard done by on a few occasions under the captaincy tenure of Kohli. Like Jadeja, he too was phased out of the white-ball teams in 2017 and 2018 in the name of “rest”. And when the time came near the 2019 WC, Ashwin was nowhere near the ODI setup. It was the first time since 2010 that India had gone into an ICC tournament without Ashwin.
Ashwin remained away from the white-ball team for four years, and made his comeback in the T20I team in 2021. He played in the 2021 and 2022 T20 WC before being dropped again and is currently not in the ODI setup as the team approaches the 2023 World Cup at home.
In Tests, Ashwin, despite being India’s arguably all-time greatest off-spinner, was dropped by Virat Kohli in the 2021 Test series in England.
