One of the earliest things that makes your eyebrows go up when you start watching Roar of the Lion — a Hotstar docudrama on Chennai Super Kings’ comeback from a two-year ban to winning the Indian Premier League title in 2018 — is when the credits roll: A Banijay Asia and Dhoni Entertainment Production.
The Hotstar Special was marketed with a trailer that had an unmissable headline-grabber: For MS Dhoni, match-fixing is a bigger crime than murder as a cricketer. Of course, that immediately dominated social media and online portals, as there was a sense of anticipation as to what the CSK captain would reveal in the documentary.
But when you see “Dhoni Entertainment” in the first few seconds, the expectations get tempered automatically. ‘Dhoni finally breaks his silence’ — well, as much as he wants to.
Sure, this is the first time Dhoni has spoken in some detail about how tough that phase was for him. Sure, he finally did speak about the franchise being in the wrong because of Gurunath Meiyappan but finished that with a caveat: who was he, really? All the players just knew him as *the* son-in-law. (Some of us know him as a cricketing enthusiast, too.) Sure, Dhoni reveals vulnerability. How difficult it was when people assumed he was a strong person and did not ask him how he was doing. Sure, this is not as blatant a brush-it-under-the-carpet treatment to the topic as it was in the Sachin Tendulkar biopic.
But this is no bare-it-all either. This is in an environment as controlled as it can possibly be, with no real follow-up questions to find out what was done behind-the-scenes about this controversy that shook Indian cricket.
In fact, what is untold in the first episode of the five-episode series is quite telling. There is a shot of Dhoni, now the Indian captain, being asked in a press conference to comment on the issue and him staying unmoved as a voice from the background says, “next question, please.”
There is another interview with senior sports writer Ayaz Memon, where he eloquently puts how serious this issue was, with N Srinivasan’s son-in-law being the prime accused: “the fire was in the team’s own backyard,” he says. Before and after that, we have some cutaway shots of Srinivasan playing golf and giving an interview, not one of the comments about his family member.
And after about half the run-time of the first episode, we go into the return of CSK after two years, and the emotional aspects of it. That is about 15 mins of the 124-minute docudrama that have been dedicated to the issue.
We move on...
An ode to the fans
With that out of the way, the rest of the series is an unabashed ode to the extraordinary connect the fans have developed with the franchise over the past decade. As Dhoni himself puts it, the association of him and the city felt like an arranged marriage out of a matrimonial website. One that clearly has worked big time.
The best moments of the documentary are, without a doubt, those dedicated to the fan-base that is now well-established as the most widespread in the country. When a little girl talks about how she stopped watching IPL for two years when her team was not there; when the Dhoni Superfan talks about the experience of taking a train to Pune along with hundreds of fans to watch his team after the Cauvery controversy cut short the team’s Chennai return; when Dhoni himself chokes and is moved to tears in the team’s private reunion party — those are the incidents that tell you what has made CSK the mega-brand that it is now, despite everything that has gone on.
It is also refreshing to see Dhoni acknowledge the “Dad’s Army” comments over the average age of his squad. He himself calls the side Chennai Senior Kings at one point and even admitted to wondering, mid-way through the season, whether that is going to come back to bite them. Among the few genuine behind-the-scenes moments we get to see is the impromptu nature of the team’s open-bus ride from their hotel to Chepauk a few days before their season began. No one knew that was on the agenda and yet, by the time the team had completed the short ride to the stadium, thousands had gathered outside, and the photos and videos were all over social media.
Apart from the cricketing angle, the series — viewed as just a docudrama — leaves a lot to be desired, though. The interviews in Tamil and English are dubbed over with Hindi or Tamil translations, which is jarring to put it mildly. It becomes especially absurd for Matthew Hayden and Kris Srikkanth, and when the former gives a long monologue in the build-up to the Shane Watson century in the final, you are left wondering whether it would have been better to just stick with actual Hindi interviews.
The editing is awkward in some sections as well, with two players talking about a particular match but the action video being shown is from different matches. There is also a bizarre moment in the final episode when, talking about all the many injuries CSK players faced during last season, Dhoni says, “I was also injured. My first injury was a strange one, when we were playing in Kolkata against KKR and I was hit by a Shane Bond delivery on my elbow.” A quick google search reveals that it happened in 2010, when Bond was still a KKR player but it still features in this documentary when talking about the team that won the 2018 season.
But if you do not care about such aspects that affect the viewing experience overall, there are enough goosebump-inducing moments for a fan.