MS Dhoni has been a pillar of the Chennai Super Kings, and his impact has always gone beyond the cricket field. His former teammate has now shared a glimpse into the team’s off-field bonding as well. According to Mike Hussey, Dhoni kept an ‘open-door policy’ during the IPL, allowing all the players to freely walk into his room to talk freely.

Speaking on The Overlap Cricket podcast, Hussey said, “Dhoni is just the most amazing guy, his room is available open 24 hours a day. So, anyone can go up there, and just sit. He has got his lounge room, players just sit around, they start talking cricket, some of them like the ‘shisha’, you know the flavored tobacco stuff. So, that is their way of socializing and things like that. Credit to Dhoni, he opens his room up, lots of players go up, they bring food up, it is fantastic.”

“He likes smoking a bit of the shisha 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 a lot of other cricket teams, it can be hierarchical, but he certainly broke that down,” he had said in a video posted by Cricket Australia in 2018 as well.

While these stories occasionally spark debates, many thought that this informal bonding culture is one of the reasons that helped CSK to function like a close-knit unit as well.