It all started with an innocuous tweet from Virat Kohli and soon blew up into yet another round of speculation about whether Mahendra Singh Dhoni had decided to call it a day. It took a categorical dismissal from Indian selectors to put the rumours to rest.
"A game I can never forget. Special night. This man, made me run like in a fitness test” Kohli tweeted, tagging Dhoni in a photograph. It was a throwback to a game against Australia when Kohli and Dhoni shared an unbeaten 67-run stand for the fifth wicket. But it ended up creating a virtual buzz around whether Dhoni had informed the Indian skipper about his plans.
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“This was as much news to us as anyone else. We opened our phones and suddenly we saw all this talk about Dhoni retiring, which has no basis. Even we are keen to know where did it all start in the first place,” chief selector MSK Prasad was flabbergasted while answering questions after naming the Indian team for the test series against South Africa.
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Speculation about Dhoni’s cricketing future has been rife ever since the team bowed out of the World Cup in July. He quit Tests in 2014. The selectors and BCCI had been bombarded with similar speculations and queries after Dhoni decided to make himself unavailable for the West Indies series. India won all three – T20, ODI and Tests – comfortably.
Dhoni, however, had already made it clear he would not be available for both the West Indies tour and South Africa series at home for various reasons – he went for a training stint with the Indian Army before the former and was on vacation in the USA after that, rendering him completely out of cricket during this period.
“We were wondering how it happened because as far as we know, nothing of this sort has taken place,” Prasad added.
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