Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel

by Chappell, Greg

  Batsmen like Dravid don’t bring a song to a spectator’s heart; they can sometimes even be tedious to watch (though Dravid was a beautiful batsman in his own right). But they are the kind whose presence every team is grateful for. The true indications of Dravid’s greatness came when batting called for more than driving on the up, when the ball curled in the air and fizzed off the pitch, and when survival became an end in itself. To India’s enormous fortune, when a situation called for a batsman to stand up and be counted, Dravid was there. Almost always.

  Some are born to greatness. Rahul Dravid acquired it. In some ways that is the greater achievement.

  Sambit Bal is the editor of ESPNcricinfo

  Dravid scored six Test hundreds in England. Only one Indian has scored more Test centuries in an overseas country – Sunil Gavaskar, who has seven in the West Indies.

  [ 4 ]

  The grit to be great

  SANJAY MANJREKAR

  When Sunil Gavaskar became the first to 10,000 Test runs, there were celebrations in India. It was a long-awaited moment; ever since his phenomenal debut series in the West Indies in 1971, Gavaskar had looked likely to overhaul the mark. As for Sachin Tendulkar, so immense is his ability that when he reached the heights he did, it was taken for granted. That his fans still feel disappointed with him, after all that he has achieved, shows that for them he is no less than god.

  With Dravid, every run he got in Tests after 3000 seemed an over-achievement. And I say this in a positive sense. Early in his career he looked a player with the kind of talent that, if combined with hard work, could get him into the Indian side. He always looked a Test prospect but not a prodigy who promised greatness. As it turned out, Dravid worked very hard, and not only did he play for India, he also got himself 13,000 runs at an average of over 52 in 164 Tests.

  That is a great achievement. And in a team sport like cricket, Dravid is an inspiration for young players, who sometimes feel inferior to a fellow player blessed with considerable natural talent. Dravid’s career average is just a shade below Tendulkar’s. That just might renew belief in virtues that youngsters are given to finding old-fashioned these days: a sound technique and a strong mind.

  I believe Dravid can be a more realistic batting role model for young Indian batsmen than a Tendulkar, a Sehwag or a VVS Laxman, for Dravid is the least gifted on that list. While Tendulkar is a prodigious, rare talent, Dravid’s basic talent can be found in many, but what he has made of it is the rare, almost unbelievable, Dravid story.

  Dravid now stands on equal footing with the two great entities of Indian cricket, Gavaskar and Tendulkar. He has tried to keep himself away from comparisons, but it is inevitable now that he will be viewed alongside these two. It is an interesting exercise.

  Gavaskar was a classy defensive batsman, who courageously took on the bowling giants of the 1970s and ‘80s, when most other Indian batsmen walked to the pitch feeling inferior. Not only did Gavaskardefy all those bowlers, he eventually mastered them. He wasn’t as gifted as Tendulkar is, so he needed to draw on reserves of will, mental strength, and a good defensive game. Gavaskar would typically take the heat for four hours or more before he felt he could dominate the bowlers, in the final session. He respected his opponents but, unlike some of his Indian contemporaries, he never considered himself weaker than them.

  Gavaskar played at a time when the bowling attacks of most teams around the world were formidable. These days most bowlers focus on containment, but in the ‘70s and ‘80s “get ‘em out” was the mantra. Back then all those fine bowlers tried everything possible to get Gavaskar out. Today most bowlers are looking to “bowl in the right areas”. This method came into fashion when the batsmen began to attack more: it made sense to keep the ball just outside the off stump and let the batsman make a mistake. Glenn McGrath’s success with this method helped it gain popularity. It is against just this sort of bowling that Dravid, a good defensive batsman with great patience, has flourished.

  After Gavaskar, whose exploits proved to the next generation of players that Indians could be batting masters of the world, arrived Tendulkar. He clearly stands above Gavaskar and Dravid in terms of sheer batting ability. He also has a disciplined cricket mind that has never allowed his aggressive batting to breed arrogance. It took Tendulkar two seasons to test the waters at the international level before proceeding to dominate the game like no Indian had done before.

  Dravid was fortunate in a sense that when he arrived in 1996, Tendulkar was already a phenomenon. Like all batsmen of his time, Dravid had accepted that Tendulkar was the best and all he could do was fight for second place. That helped him focus on his own game and avoid looking at it in comparison to Tendulkar’s.

  However, if Dravid had played in the ‘70s and ‘80s, life would have been easier for him. Those were times when leaving a ball got nods of approval and admiration from spectators. Dravid played the bulk of his cricket in an era when defensive batting was considered almost a handicap. It is rare to see a defensive batsman come through the modern system.

  Not to say that Dravid was all defensive, though. He had one shot that is uncommon in a defensive Indian batsman: the pull. It is a superb instinctive stroke against fast bowling, and it is a stroke he had from the outset; a shot that bailed him out of many tight situations in Tests.

  Gavaskar was a great defensive batsman who took on the best at their best and won. Tendulkar was blessed with outrageous talent that he never took for granted. Dravid perhaps had the strongest mind among the three, the largest mental reserves.

  Gavaskar did have mental strength but he had occasional indiscretions, which gave you cause to think that the great man was not really tuned in that day, that he had not yet recovered from the last mammoth effort, perhaps. He also took one-day cricket lightly, so as to reserve his best for Test matches. In Dravid’s batting, on the other hand, you saw the same intensity in every international innings he played.

  When his place in the one-day team came up for scrutiny early in the 2000s, it was a difficult period for Dravid because he wasn’t very good at the shorter form of the game at the time. He was lucky to have Sourav Ganguly as captain. Ganguly wanted someone sensible and dependable, like Dravid, alongside him. Dravid’s transition from then on as a batsman, and especially as a valuable one-day batsman, was inspiring. His progress in this period gave us our first insights into his great mind.

  I must confess, Dravid’s attitude at the start of his career concerned me. As young cricketers we were often reminded to not think too much – and sometimes reprimanded by our coaches and senior team-mates for doing so. Being a thinker in cricket, it is argued, makes you complicate a game that is played best when it is kept simple. I thought Dravid was doing precisely that: thinking too much about his game, his flaws and so on. I once saw him shadow-play a false shot that had got him out. No problem with that, everyone does it. Just that Dravid was rehearsing the shot at a dinner table in a restaurant! This trait made me wonder whether this man, who we all knew by then was going to be the next No. 3 for India, was going to over-think his game and throw it all away. He reminded me a bit of myself.

  Somewhere down the line, much to everyone’s relief, I think Dravid managed to strike the right balance. He seemed to tone down the obsession over his game and his technique, and started obsessing over success instead. Perhaps he looked a lot more studious and intense on television to us than he actually is out there.

  Life cannot have been easy for a defensive batsman in this age, when saving runs rather than taking wickets is the general approach of teams. A defensive batsman’s forte is his ability to defend the good balls and hit the loose ones for four. But with bowlers often looking to curb batsmen by setting defensive fields, batting becomes a bit of a struggle for players like Dravid.

  It is a struggle he was content with, though. He did not commit the folly of being embarrassed about grindi
ng when everyone around him was attacking and bringing the crowd to their feet. He was quite happy batting on 20 when his partner had raced to 60 in the same time. Once he got past 50, he sometimes seemed to get into this “mental freeze” state, where it did not matter to him if he was stuck on 80 or 90 for an hour; he resisted the temptation to do anything different to quickly get to the next stage of the innings. It is a temptation that many defensive batsmen succumb to after hours at the crease. When the patience starts to wear, you think of hitting over the infield, for example, to get a hundred. Dravid knew this was something Sehwag could get away with, not him.

  That Dravid has played more innings that have mattered for the team is not a coincidence. It’s the kind of person that he is, the kind a school teacher will give ten out of ten to in an assessment: the sort of perfect role model that the Indian middle-class family value system often throws up. Those middle-class values are, I believe, India’s greatest strength, and Dravid is among the finest illustrations of that fact.

  Former India batsman Sanjay Manjrekar is a cricket commentator and presenter on TV. A version of this article was published in Cricinfo Magazine in 2006

  Dravid bowled 20 overs in his Test career, and took one wicket for 39 runs: that of West Indies wicketkeeper Ridley Jacobs, in the Antigua Test in 2002.

  [ 5 ]

  A cricketer most evolved

  AAKASH CHOPRA

  I still fondly recall that brisk summer evening in Australia in early 2004. We had levelled a series for the first time in a long time in that country. Rahul Dravid, a senior team-mate and my hero, sat next to me in a rather cheery dressing room, and I hesitantly spoke to him about my batting, hoping to get his two cents.

  As always, he was eager to help. Besides the many things that I picked up from him that day, what struck me was his honesty and humility – which I believe are the first steps towards greatness.

  Dravid, in his classic self-effacing way, confessed to being, for the most part, an on-side player. The bowlers had come to know of his strengths and had stopped feeding him on his legs. He had to find another way to score runs, he said. Which was how he became one of cricket’s outstanding off-side batsmen.

  That was an overwhelming revelation for me: what seemed like second nature to Dravid had been, in fact, practised and perfected. Just a few days ago he had stunned everyone with his stupendous double-century in Adelaide, an innings punctuated with an array of breathtaking cover drives, piercing the smallest gaps with surgical precision. How could one believe that his impeccable off-side play didn’t come naturally to him?

  It was only my second series for India, but Dravid had already become my go-to man, my mentor, for queries to do with technique and temperament. His confession had been in response to my concern about my inability to score big runs despite getting good starts. He didn’t have to expose chinks in his armour when he answered, but he did.

  Years later that chat with Dravid made me go back and search for videos of him batting early in his career. I wanted to know if the confession had just been an attempt to pep me up. What I found made me respect Dravid, the man and the batsman, more.

  When he started out, Dravid used to crouch a lot more in his stance, with his head falling over a bit towards the off side. His bat, coming from the direction of gully, forced him to make a huge loop at the top of the backlift. Both the backlift and the falling head allowed him to punish anything that was even marginally on his legs. His wide backlift also made him a good cutter of the ball, provided there was width on offer. On the flip side, it meant fewer front-foot strokes on the off side. In fact, mid-off was rarely brought into play. Dravid said that because he grew up playing on jute matting wickets, he became a good back-foot player and also strong on the legs, for the bounce allowed him to work balls, even those pitched within the stumps, towards the on side. He was a predominantly bottom-hand player, he said.

  The knowledge of where his off stump was, coupled with his immense patience, ensured Dravid continued to score bucketfuls of runs in Test cricket, in spite of the bowlers finding him out. But though the runs were coming, they were not coming as briskly as he would have liked. He had to stay longer at the crease to accumulate his runs, and that eventually cost him his place in the ODI team. He needed to find ways to open up his off-side play. That’s why he chose to not get behind the line of the ball at all times, and also started to use his top hand a lot more.

  An ardent follower of the Gavaskar school of batting, Dravid would, when he started out, go back and across before the ball was bowled, and then further across to get behind the line of the ball. While this method worked well in Test cricket, it needed some tinkering with in the shorter format. So instead of going back and across, he preferred going back and back, to ensure he stayed beside the ball more often, which allowed him to free his arms while playing through the off. These tweaks were successful and Dravid went on to play his finest cricket in that period.

  That was not the end of it, though. When you think you have mastered your biggest shortcoming and can breathe easy, something else that is unwanted creeps into your system. While the back-and-back trigger movement worked really well for Dravid, his front foot started going a bit too far across in the process. The movement across the stumps allows you to cover the swing a little better, but it also blurs your judgement of lines, with regard to deciding which deliveries to play and which to leave alone.

  Mitchell Johnson, with his line that goes across the right-hander, forced Dravid to play at deliveries he would have left alone if his front foot had not gone so far across. And uncharacteristically, Dravid got out fishing outside the off stump on more than a few occasions.

  Once again, the challenge was to find a solution to a technical glitch. Dravid’s answer was to completely eliminate the trigger movement and stay perfectly still till the bowler released the ball.

  That may sound like a simple adjustment, but a batsman will tell you that it is perhaps the toughest one to make. Even though the movement occurs before the ball is bowled, and is only a few centimetres, it’s as important as the movement after the ball is bowled. The trigger movement sets the body in motion and allows it to get into the right positions to meet the ball. Eliminating the trigger movement is sort of like engaging fifth gear right after turning on the ignition in a car. And the catch is that it will not work if you are constantly thinking about not moving. The only thing you should be thinking about while standing is your response to the delivery.

  It must have taken hundreds of hours of practice to get it into his system, so as to make it absolutely seamless; Dravid went through the grind. Nothing great was ever accomplished without passion.

  He went on to have the best Test series of his career in England in 2011, where he not only got runs but was extremely fluent in getting them. Yet the adjustment he had made meant he didn’t have a second line of defence – so if he was beaten, he was likely to get bowled, not struck on the pad. And that was what happened in Australia.

  Dravid had been aware of the risks involved, but it was a gamble he had been ready to take. There was a hullabaloo about Dravid’s dismissals in Australia – as if being bowled was dishonourable. Being dismissed essentially means being beaten by a bowler. What difference does it make if one is bowled, lbw or caught behind?

  Knowing Dravid, if he had decided to play on, he would have found ways, yet again, to address the slip. For him, nothing was unachievable.

  Perhaps that is what made him the most evolved cricketer of this era. Change didn’t mean only survival for him; it also meant the maturity to create endlessly. His desire for growth was intense enough to work on both conscious and unconscious levels: while he intentionally worked on his trigger movement and playing beside the line, things like his stance – which was more upright in the latter half of his career – and the straighter descent of the bat happened almost automatically over the period.
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  In cricket, as in life, it is not the most talented who survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change. Dravid’s career was an eternal quest to get better. Everything he did was to, as he puts it best, “deliver the bat at the right time”.

  Former India opener Aakash Chopra is the author of Out of the Blue, an account of Rajasthan’s 2010-11 Ranji Trophy victory. This article was first published on March 19, 2012 on ESPNcricinfo

  Dravid opened the innings only 23 times in Tests, but he scored four centuries in those innings. Only six Indian openers have scored more hundreds: Sunil Gavaskar, Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Navjot Sidhu, Wasim Jaffer and Vinoo Mankad.

  [ 6 ]

  A fascinating captain and the job he fell out of love with

  SIDHARTH MONGA

  Rahul Dravid became the best batsman, wicketkeeper, short leg, silly point and slip he could become. It is a fairly prosaic, unglamorous thing to say of a cricketer, but it is a difficult achievement to pull off. To use every bit of talent and time; to be in the right physical, psychological and emotional state to do so. As a player, Dravid did just that.

  Dravid the captain was a different story; more fascinating and contradictory too. He brought more natural talent and flair to captaincy than he did to batting, yet it can be argued Dravid didn’t become the best captain he could have been. Having recently become a father when he took over captaincy full time, he strove to look at cricket as just a sport, not more, which should in part explain the sense of adventure he brought to captaincy – he hated losing, didn’t fear it. Yet so careworn had he become by the end of it all that he uncharacteristically sat on a series lead in his last Test in charge. No follow-on, despite a 319-run lead against England at The Oval, no push for a win.