There has been a destructive bowling spell in Test cricket by a wicketkeeper, but you have to go back to Alfred Lyttelton in 1884 to find it, so when Mahendra Singh Dhoni unstrapped the pads and bowled for India immediately after lunch it was apparent that, only four sessions into the series, they had a crisis on their hands. Nine balls into his spell they almost had a triumph. Kevin Pietersen played and missed at a wide one, Dhoni roared for a catch at the wicket and umpire Billy Bowden upheld the appeal. Pietersen, whose bat had actually brushed his pad, called for a review as if affronted by the suggestion he might have nicked it. As Bowden hid behind a very large upturned collar the TV umpire, Marais Erasmus, reprieved him. If the Indian board, the great non-believers in technology, had shunned umpiring reviews completely in this series Dhoni would now have a Test wicket. Perhaps there will be an overnight statement railing about the fallibility of Hotspot.
Only 13 wickets have been taken by wicketkeepers in Test history, most of them arising out of desperation or sheer boredom. Mark Boucher, the last wicketkeeper to take one, six years ago, bowled during a West Indies total of 747 in Antigua, an innings during which all 11 South Africans turned their arms over. Jim Parks' leg-spin once caused a smile or two as India, made to follow-on in Kanpur in the 1960s, survived with ease.
Dhoni's spell was different – it arose from neither of these, not even from captaincy chutzpah, but from sheer necessity. The loss of Zaheer Khan with a hamstring strain on the opening day had left India with three specialist bowlers and the captain with no choice but to while away a few overs to get through the day.
He was in the nets early to practise, already fearing that it could be a long day. Zaheer, who goes pop more often than a pre-war lightbulb, is a risky man to have in a four-strong attack. In the Lord's pavilion, they must have watched Dhoni bustle in and presumed that it would all go rather well. After all, it was a past MCC president, no less, who had produced the greatest spell by a wicketkeeper in Test history, when Lyttelton, nephew of Gladstone, and later to serve as Minister of State for the Colonies, took four for 19 against Australia at The Oval with demonic underarm lobs. WG Grace kept wicket and probably sledged them out.
Dhoni preferred bustling medium-pace, touching 80mph at times, which was roughly comparable to the pace of Praveen Kumar, a swing bowler of old-fashioned virtues playing only his second Test. It was hard to imagine what the old fox, Duncan Fletcher, was making of it. He likes his cricketers to be multi-dimensional and you could not get much more versatile than this. But he also likes his fast bowlers to bowl at 90mph and aggressively, and here they were behaving as if they were on a speed-awareness course.
Dhoni bowled with a batsman's nous. His second ball swung back sharply into Pietersen's jutting front pad and he roared for lbw, but Pietersen was outside the line, as invariably he was for much of his innings. He saw Pietersen walking across his stumps, so tried to york him behind his legs. He saw him walking forward, obsessing as ever over front-foot shots, so banged one in short. At least he delayed the second new ball without much damage so his new-ball bowlers could have a rest, but the first ball he bowled to Ian Bell, late cut for four, a signature shot for the Warwickshire man these days, confirmed that he had become easy money.
Dhoni does have a wicket in one-day cricket, one that arose in unusual circumstances in the 2009 Champions Trophy in South Africa. India's selectors had insisted that Dhoni should regard Abhishek Nayar not as a batsman but as an all-rounder. Dhoni demurred – he is barely as good as me, he felt – so against West Indies at the Wanderers, he brought on Nayar and bowled himself at the other end. Dhoni bowled Travis Dowlin in his first over. His point had been made.
