Former Australian limited-overs captain George Bailey has recently praised the Indian wicketkeeper-batsman and the former Indian captain MS Dhoni for his calmness and brilliant handling ability to the younger cricketers.

Bailey recently told Cricket Australia, “The greatest thing I took from MS was just the ability of him to impact the calmness of the team with his calmness. With the chaos, and whatever is happening in the game numerous times, you see him being so calm behind the wickets. With the bat in his hand, you can certainly feel he’s got a plan and he’s got something covered here and it’s going to be okay.”

Bailey played a lot of times under MS Dhoni’s captaincy during the Indian Premier League (IPL). Under Dhoni’s captaincy, Bailey played for Chennai Super Kings (2009-2012) and Rising Pune Supergiants (2016), during his IPL career.

Praising about Dhoni’s handling style to the cricketers, Bailey said, “He likes smoking a bit of the sheesha or the hookah. So, he quite often would set that up in his room, and it was very much open door policy. You would go in and quite often find a lot of younger players there. For India or lot of other cricket teams, it can be hierarchical, but he certainly broke that down. You just find yourself in his room late at night chatting inevitably about the game or different facets of the game with different people. It’s a great way to break down barriers.”

Bailey further claimed that some of Dhoni’s instructions can confuse the bowlers as Dhoni has totally different plans but it brings very effective results for his team.

Bailey said, “He can really panic some bowlers, it’s quite funny going into some bowling meetings because he would never come to them. The bowlers would spend their time looking at wagon wheels and preparing how are they going to bowl to the batsman and they walk out to the field and have the bowl in their hand and MS would just point in a completely different direction. You can see a few of the bowler’s eyes start to spin. He has such confidence, such a steely determination and belief that he inspires the bulk of the bowlers to do the right thing.”