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'MS Dhoni called me and said...': Dinesh Karthik's ultimate stamp of approval from MSD in 'least expected' gesture
Dinesh Karthik has created a niche for himself on and off the pitch over the last few years and MS Dhoni was quite appreciative of what he has achieved.
Dinesh Karthik may have dropped off from the top flight cricket scene for a few years late in the last decade but he has created a niche for himself in recent years on and off the field. The 37-year-old, who is among the few to remain active in the IPL despite having been a top drawer player back when the auction for the first season of the league was held in 2008, found a second wind in his international career as a T20 finisher last year.
While he may have dropped out of the Indian team after the 2022 T20 World Cup, Karthik has also earned plaudits for the commentary stints he has done since India's tour of England in March 2021. It had looked like Karthik would be transitioning into becoming a full-time commentator before he had a bumper season with the Royal Challengers Bangalore as a finisher and that led to him making a comeback in the Indian team. Karthik is back in the gantry for India's ongoing Test series against Australia.
“I enjoyed commentary in the little stints that I did. I think I enjoyed speaking about the game, looking at it very analytically, at the same time trying to, you know, get something meaningful across to everybody who's watching this sport. So, you know, I always tried to make sense out of a situation in my own way and tried to articulate it in the way I thought it was,” said Karthik about his commentary stints on the RCB podcast.
Karthik also revealed that he got plaudits from MS Dhoni. The former India captain and Karthik's careers have overlapped in a number of ways in previous years. There are many who consider the moment that Dhoni burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s as the moment that Karthik lost his chances of being India's regular wicketkeeper, something that Karthik himself has stated he has no issues with in the past.
"And my biggest accolade came from the person that I least expected from -- MS Dhoni. He called me and said: 'I really enjoyed the commentary. Very, very good. Well done.' I was like, Wow, thank you so much. So, that is big, you know, obviously, he watches a lot of this sport. And so and to hear him say that was really good. And I was happy that you enjoyed my commentary," said Karthik.
Karthik scored 330 runs in 16 innings batting in the lower middle order for RCB at a strike rate of 183.33 in the 2022 season of the IPL. It led to him getting a recall to the Indian team for the first time in three years. While he had a number of stellar performances for the time in bilateral matches, Karthik struggled to reproduce that form in the 2022 T20 World Cup.
