First published in 2014

You would be forgiven for thinking that winning the World Cup was MS Dhoni’s finest moment. After all, that wonderfully free hit over mid-on for six – a stroke of majesty and triumph to close the deal – lifted a heavy burden from the shoulders of all India. The young were sick of hearing about the old, hearing tales of Kapil Dev’s famous band who had won the World Cup in England in 1983. India’s youth finally had its moment and, best of all, had it at home, in the city of Gavaskar and Tendulkar, and from the hand of a captain whose swashbuckling style had made him as much a darling in the grand homes of Kolkata as in the fishing villages of Kerala.

MS and me are off for dinner. He is wearing trainers, jeans sawn off at the knee, a T-shirt and a camouflage jacket. We turn left out of the team hotel and left again down an alleyway that leads us immediately into the central square of another provincial English town. After a third left and a stroll past Nando’s – he wants a break, he says – we enter another chicken-type diner that he says is pretty good. During this short walk, the Indian captain is asked to pose for 25 photographs. To the first family of five he says no, but adds that he will be back a little later and will happily answer their call then. Fifty metres later he relents. Of course, five means 25. “Rahul [Dravid] taught me how to say no politely,” he says, “but in the end, when it is only a few people, why not.”

In the diner, the manager’s face lights up. Dhoni hands him a signed Indian shirt. Waiters gather to look. The place is near empty. We sit at a small table and drink orange juice. He is an unbelievably good-looking man. A woman comes over with her daughter. She shoves her forward and Dhoni gives a nice smile for the ‘snap’. The woman cannot contain herself and, puce with embarrassment, asks if she can do the same. “No problem,” he says. The husband comes over too. You’ve probably got the picture by now. The chicken arrives.

He gets up from the table to pay the bill. The waiters line up for selfies. Outside, the night is closing in but still people want their piece of history with the most marketable, perhaps most remarkable, cricketer on the planet. As we walk, I ask if he thinks captaincy is a calling. “Well, I remember playing in a senior district match, long before I ever captained a team. I was bowling and one of the team dropped a catch and then, with a couple of others, laughed about it like they couldn’t care less. Between overs I told them to stand together, well out of the way, and laugh all they like. I said the rest of us will get on with taking the wickets.

“I suppose that suggests I wanted to be the leader. Time allows you to learn to read the game and then you work out the direction you think a team should take. After that, you decide on the process and if you get the job, you put it in place. So we are back with the process, where we began two hours ago.”

Before we say goodnight, he leaves me with a simple final thought. “A perfect smile is too often missing from the faces of the world. If cricket can provide more smiles, it is doing its job.” He said we should meet again and that he would tell me more about his friends in the special forces. I can’t wait.