“Nobody tells you anything, you just feel it,” Dhoni says. “I back my instincts, which tell me this player has looked good and will do well. You have to stand by people. And it’s okay with me if I am harsh on people sometimes — you have to be — because I know they’re responding well to me and my decisions. We all back each other in the team and that’s important,” he says.

Consider this: He dropped Virender Sehwag from the XI and brought in Munaf Patel, going with five bowlers rather than the age-old policy of playing seven specialist bats in Australia.
He brought in Praveen Kumar in place of Sreesanth next match even when the lineup was looking settled, he got Irfan Pathan to bat at number three though Gautam Gambhir had scored a hundred in the last game, and he picked Manoj Tiwary when everybody thought Suresh Raina was the obvious choice. Why? He had a feeling.

Before that, Murali Kartik had been brought in from nowhere to play a match-winning role against Australia and Pakistan. And when Kartik was looking set to continue his international journey, Dhoni suddenly preferred Piyush Chawla.
Dhoni defied assumptions, traditional guidelines and sometimes even logic. With him at the helm, it’s foolhardy to second-guess the team, which is picked purely on intuition.

Wicket-keeping, batting, captaincy. It’s not easy to do all three things successfully because of the heavy workload. But Dhoni is unfazed. “It’s a privilege for me to take on the responsibility that comes with captaincy. To do all this at the international level is great, and I’m loving every moment.”

... contd.