Rate MS Dhoni higher than Ricky Ponting as captain, says Shahid Afridi

When for a good part of the 2000s it looked like Australia’s then-skipper Ricky Ponting’s legacy and accolades as a skipper was going to remain unperturbed, India’s MS Dhoni appeared as a bolt from the blue and took world cricket by storm. After leading the side to the T20 World Cup title in 2007 in his first tournament as skipper, Dhoni then led India to the number one ranking in Test cricket in 2009, after which he delivered the side the 50-over World Cup and Champions Trophy titles in 2011 and 2013 respectively. Under his leadership - which boasted a unique style - India became a superpower that Dhoni’s predecessor Sourav Ganguly had envisioned. 

These accolades collected by the former Indian skipper have seen many brand Dhoni as a superior skipper to Ponting and now former Pakistan skipper Shahid Afridi, too, has jumped on the bandwagon and has rated the wicket-keeper batsman as a better captain than the Aussie run-machine. In a Q & A session with his followers on Twitter, Afridi revealed that he rated Dhoni as a better captain than Ponting, for the simple fact that he believed that the wicket-keeper batsman developed ‘a team full of youngsters’. Ponting, in fact, has been branded by many as ‘lucky’ for inheriting a champion team that was built by Steve Waugh.

Afridi, in the same Q & A session, meanwhile also answered a vast variety of questions. The explosive all-rounder revealed that he believed Australia’s Pat Cummins to be the best bowler in the world at the moment and also revealed that Saeed Anwar was, during his playing days, his favourite batting partner. The 40-year-old also labelled the great sir Viv Richards as his favourite batsman of all time and described Pakistan’s limited-overs skipper Babar Azam as the backbone of the team’s batting.

Excerpts from Afridi’s Q & A: