Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel

by Chappell, Greg

  The Indian dressing room will be a different place without Rahul bhai. His knowledge of the game, his experience of handling pressure, how to calibrate a chase or set a target, his pitch-reading skills – they will all definitely be missed. He was always willing to do things for the team: ready to open, ready to bat at No. 3, ready to keep, ready to captain. He was a responsible man, and through his actions he inspired us to play from our hearts and give 100%.

  Just like Dravid the batsman who never looked like getting out, Dravid the man will always remain a part of my life.

  India batsman Suresh Raina played 61 internationals alongside Rahul Dravid. Raina spoke to Nagraj Gollapudi, assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo

  Shane Warne dismissed Dravid more often than any bowler in Tests – eight times in 13 Tests. In all international cricket, Brett Lee leads the way, with 12 dismissals in 38 matches.

  [ 12 ]

  ‘I can’t recall beating him more than one ball in a row’

  JASON GILLESPIE

  The game of cricket is the battle between bat and ball. It is about who loses patience first; that determines the winner. Rahul Dravid was a master at staying patient for long, long periods of time. He won the battles more often.

  Good bowlers are able to put pressure on a batsman, no matter how good, and draw him out of his comfort zone. How tough was Dravid? Dravid was so patient, he made you bowl to him. Because he did not give his wicket away easily, you had to be incredibly disciplined against him in line and length to get the better of him.

  That was easier said than done. It is easy to assume, like many other fast bowlers might have done, that you could settle into one line against Dravid, as opposed to someone like Virender Sehwag, who can easily distract you with his penchant for strokes. Dravid, being a very disciplined player, was never easy to lure. He had a set way of playing; he would always wait for a bowler to make a mistake, unlike Sehwag, who tries to take it to the bowler.

  Dravid complemented the more aggressive batsmen in the Indian batting line-up perfectly. He brought stability to their batting order, which was full of stroke-makers like Sachin Tendulkar, Sehwag, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly.

  He was a rock-solid player, someone who valued his wicket, someone against whom you knew you were in for a real hard task. He could judge whether to play or leave the ball, especially early in his innings. He knew where his off stump was – an important asset to have for a top-order batsman.

  Dravid had a simple game plan and he stuck to it. It comes back to patience: he had the patience to grind out long innings and wait for the right ball to hit. He had his specific shots that he wanted to play, and he would wait for the bowler to pitch in the area where he was comfortable playing an attacking shot. That made him very difficult to get out.

  The two best examples of how we lost the battle of wearing him down came in 2001 in Kolkata and 2003 in Adelaide. Both were good batting pitches. Our plan on both occasions was to be patient ourselves and stick to good bowling areas. Certainly in Adelaide there was good bounce and carry, and we thought that if we stuck to our plans we could get anyone out. But the way Dravid played, essentially he was more patient than us bowlers. We became impatient, especially when he scored that double-century, because we could not get him out, and that made us go away from our game plan. That in turn worked for him because his plan was to wait for the bowler to lose patience.

  Some might say our bowling attack in Adelaide was not as strong as the one in Kolkata, but I was leading a very good bowling attack and we believed we could dominate the Indians. However, we were just not good enough against Dravid. It was old-fashioned hard work, which he put in successfully and we did not.

  I cannot recall beating Dravid more than one ball in a row. I remember in Adelaide, in the first innings, at one point I decided to have a real go at him and bowl a few short deliveries. He was ducking them pretty comfortably, and then suddenly he played a hook shot. It was a sort of top edge – it went for a six and he got to his first hundred. I was pretty devastated. That was an example of when I decided to move away from my game plan and he was well settled at the crease and took me on confidently.

  In 2001 when we went to India, we started off in Mumbai by winning the Test comfortably. In Kolkata, having forced them to follow on, we felt we had won the game, having picked up early wickets during their second innings. Dravid and Laxman together, we knew they were very good players, but we thought if we kept at them, they wouldn’t be able to deal with the pressure. But they counterattacked perfectly. I remember Dravid just playing in the V with a very straight bat and providing wonderful support to Laxman. We just could not dislodge them.

  At the end of that fourth day when we returned to the dressing room, with Dravid and Laxman unbeaten, we were like, “Wow, what just happened?” We were a little stunned and very disappointed. We knew we were just one ball away from getting one of their wickets, but we couldn’t produce that one ball. Those guys had done something special and we had to respect their performance.

  We all learn. On that 2001 trip, our fast bowlers’ plan was to bowl in the channel outside the off stump, get the Indian batsmen playing on one side of the wicket, and create opportunities that way. But we realised that Indian pitches were a lot flatter and slower and our plan would work only on bouncier tracks. In 2004, when we returned to India, we accounted for that and changed our lines to bowling a lot straighter and looking to hit the stumps every time. That worked, and it was one time that even Dravid was circumspect and vulnerable.

  The special thing about Dravid was that when he got a bad ball, he would be waiting for it and he had the ability to put it away. He did not miss those opportunities to score. That is sometimes the difference between a very good player and a great player: the ability to score when you get the chance to score. And that is one of the reasons he averaged mid-50s consistently in Test cricket.

  Many might call him a defensive batsman in the mould of a Jacques Kallis or a Michael Atherton, but Dravid ranks up there with the great batsmen of the game. To simply refer to him as a defensive player is selling him short as a batsman. He was a wonderfully gifted player and we all enjoyed the way he played the game.

  Former Australia fast bowler Jason Gillespie dismissed Dravid eight times in the 22 international matches he played against India. Gillespie spoke to Nagraj Gollapudi, assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo, where this article was first published on March 9, 2012

  Dravid is one of four batsmen to be bowled more than 100 times in all international matches. He was out that way 112 times. The others in the top four: Tendulkar (117), Border (110) and Steve Waugh (102).

  [ 13 ]

  His team, his time

  RAHUL BHATTACHARYA

  “I do my best to be in a relaxed state of mind because that’s when I play at my best. I try to slow things down a couple of days before the game. I have long lunches, do things in an unhurried way. The morning of the match I always get up a couple of hours before we have to get to the ground, so that I have plenty of time to get ready. I take my time to have a bath, wear my clothes, eat breakfast. I never rush things, and that sort of sets up my mood for the rest of the day.”

  This was to Wisden Asia Cricket in Australia in December of 2003. Those were different times. Rahul Dravid had become India’s batting leader but not still its captain; he had recently become a husband but not yet a father. Two years on, this is the build-up to his first Test series as full-time captain of India.

  He spent the long evening of November 28 at the Wankhede in Mumbai, leading India to a series-levelling win against South Africa. Seventy-eight not out chasing – drenched, coarse batting: he willed it, really. He applauded the spectators from mid-pitch moments after victory, called them “stars” at the presentation ceremony, and at the press conference that followed, he paid tribute above all to the unity within a team that had just completed an extrao
rdinary turnaround in the one-day game. He slept not a wink – “saw no point in it”, probably could not have from the adrenaline of the past month even if he wanted – and took a 3am flight to Bangalore.

  At 5.30am he was home and delighted to find awake not only his wife but also Samit Rahul Dravid, all of six weeks (beam, soft smile, blush). He spent the whole of November 29 “doing nothing, absolutely nothing”. The next morning he was on the plane to Chennai and by early afternoon at a practice session that was the first involving Sourav Ganguly and Greg Chappell since their little email misunderstanding. That evening he “had a little meeting with Greg to talk about Test cricket, general things, specific things to the match”, departed to receive his wife and son at the airport, returned only at half past ten and went to bed later than usual.

  The following morning, December 1, he was at the ground with the team at 9.30am for a long session under billowing skies. It included, among other things, support staff delivering balls in Muralitharan action from atop chairs. At its completion he shuffled up to the first floor for a trophy-unveiling ceremony, shuffled back down while the Sri Lanka captain and coach did their presser, shuffled back up to do India’s, where he showed just who was in charge by admonishing a senior journalist’s innuendo about Virender Sehwag’s niggle with a blunt, “There’s no need to make issues of little things.”

  Shortly after, he was in a selection meeting with Greg Chappell and Kiran More at the hotel. “Formally I will announce the XI only in the team meeting. Anyway it’s only one or two guys who’ve missed out you need to tell – those guys I would have already told.” Following the selection discussion, “some food, bed for a bit. Then a captain’s meeting with the match officials. Now this.”

  “This” being Cricinfo Magazine’s first intrusion, which began at precisely 5.30pm in the coffee shop, as scheduled. Throwing regular glances at the interviewer’s wrist while speaking passionately, the captain sprang up and shook hands in the middle of an answer at exactly a minute shy of 6pm. “Got to run, mate, another meeting.”

  This was the team meeting where Anil Kumble talked about his preparation for a Test match, Sachin Tendulkar dwelled on a few differences between Test and one-day cricket, and the captain himself, and VVS Laxman, relived their Adelaide partnership of 2003, because “one of the things we’re trying to do is make team meetings more interactive than watching endless replays of the opposing batsmen. You realise when champions like Sachin or Anil talk about the game, how much of time and thought they put into it – it’s not that they become champions by just turning up.”

  On the heels of the team meeting, the team dinner, since “anyway we have to eat food and people tend to stay cooped up in their rooms and order room service and watch television. These are great opportunities – to sit around and talk, try and make it as informal as possible, don’t try to make it too heavy as if you’re trying to give advice. I think Greg and Ian [Frazer] have been very good in that way.” An early night.

  And after all that, three and a half days of weather-watching. This meant trips to inspect the ground, on one of which he browsed the boundary, high-fiving the few hundred poor souls who had landed there hoping against hope; a few sessions at the gym; acquainting himself with the new selectors; providing his input on India’s itinerary for the tour to Pakistan; giving several interviews, engaging in more relaxed interaction with the players; spending bonus time with his family; and revisiting parts of Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy (on the menu over the last few months has been a book on the NFL, one on boxing, and a couple on management, passed on by Frazer).

  Chennai finished with four fruitless sessions of cricket. Then it was off to Delhi and the whole thing began again and finished in triumph, but by that evening Kolkata was burning again and the following day the Left and the BJP had found common cause in Parliament and it all promised to be just the start. By Ahmedabad the poor chap was in hospital. This now is Dravid’s world.

  “It is different,” he shrugs, smiles. “I spoke to a few captains before I took the job up – and in the course of even when I was vice-captain – whether it’s been a Mark Taylor or Steve Waugh or Gavaskar, the basic thing they told me is that you grow into the job. One of the things you realise is the pace of the whole thing. It needs a bit of getting used to, no doubt about that.”

  Queried once about the three most important attributes for a batsman, Dravid’s first response was “balance”. It is a quality that will now be tested more than ever at the crease and he knows it because he always does. Rahul has been waiting – waiting, watching, listening, learning, preparing – long enough. His team, his time.

  There’s the bigger picture. Asked if he’s getting a sense of the kind of captain he’d like to be, Dravid says it will take time. “But,” he adds without cue, “I do have a sense of the kind of team I’d like to have.” Which is?

  “Which is, obviously, tough, competitive – a team that is looking to improve and have some fun along the way. Not taking things too seriously, as at the end of the day it is sport and we must have a lot of fun playing it and must play it hard.”

  As new captains mostly do, else there would scarcely be need to appoint them, Dravid has inherited a team in flux. At the time of writing it is not known whether Ganguly will be on the plane to Pakistan or not. The same for Zaheer Khan. VVS Laxman and Anil Kumble, who are out of the one-day squad. Ashish Nehra is Ashish Nehra and on the mend. L Balaji is crocked and somewhat forgotten.

  And it has hardly been as simple as that. For a period it appeared that the BCCI’s master plan to revive a flagging team was to appoint alternating captains while the board had some fun in court. The new coach was not exactly looked upon as Santa Claus. Without question it has been the most controversial year for Indian cricket since Mr MK was pouring his heart out to the CBI at the top of the decade. In case it has been forgotten, till September it had been a fairly rotten year for India’s results too.

  Something needed to be done. Chappell’s and Dravid’s approach, of which they were able to convince the selectors, was a shake-up. It has been the first and most crucial phase of team-building and it has been difficult. Some terribly cold decisions have been taken, opinions on which are bound to remain divided. It is possible that some may have caused Dravid unease, but it is clear that he stands steadfast by a philosophy of team ethic, and that stagnation has hurt as much as defeat. He is after self-starters, those who “can look back and say that I’m a better player now than I was four years ago. Or, I can do this better.” He does not like naming names but over and over in conversation he will return to the phrase “finding the right people”.

  “The right people and – I hate to say it – not have the wrong people around them. You don’t want people whose own insecurities, whose own problems and whose own fears drag everyone else down. That can be a big dampener in teams. I want to say that at this level I shouldn’t need to motivate anyone. If I’m needing to motivate an international cricketer then there’s something wrong actually. The challenge is to not demotivate anyone.

  “If you’re going to be spending time in the team always having to cajole and look after a few people, you’re doing a disservice to the rest because you’re wasting and investing too much time and energy in a few people who’re taking away from the group. Players need to understand that they need to give energy to the unit. There are times, of course, when you’re not doing well and your form’s not good and you’ll need the support of other people. But most of the time you’ve got to give to the team and make sacrifices to the team and give back to the team.”

  But are not bad boys, lonesome hobos, sluggish talents, going to be part of any side? What is his attitude towards them?

  “I believe that you need different kinds of characters in the team. But there are certain non-negotiable rules because you’re playing a team sport. You’ve got to understand that your behaviour,
the way you conduct yourself, affects other people and you have a responsibility to all of them. Those are the broad rules we work under. But within those non-negotiable rules I think it’s important to allow people to express themselves.”

  What, for example, did he say to the mightily gifted, passionate, but perma-dander-up Harbhajan Singh? In this instance Harbhajan came with particular baggage: he had openly sided with Ganguly in the Chappell row, and there had been suggestions, some, sadly, from within the team, that he had been deliberately trying to undermine Dravid. All through, his form had remained nondescript.

  “Well, Harbhajan’s a champion performer. One of the great things about Harbhajan is that he really cares about his bowling. He’s a very proud cricketer. And it’s not hard work with people like that. I’ve no problems working with people who want to be champions, as simple as that. I think he figured out for himself that he needed to focus a bit more on the game and not worry about anything else, get back to what he was doing when he was successful. It’s credit to him, it’s not about what I’ve told him.”

  What is the basic approach, though? The man to whose tome he has written a foreword, Steve Waugh, mentions slipping players memos, encouraging poems and other such cute stuff. Is Rahul Dravid a speech-maker? A one-on-one man? He laughs. “Better ask the guys.”

  Laughed off, too, are queries about perceptions of Chappell’s domineering style. “I don’t know where that has come from. I’ve not found him domineering at all. He’s been more than willing to listen to my ideas and my thoughts, and I get a very good say. At the end of the day I think he believes that a captain must get what he wants. In fact, in a lot of ways we do a lot of things in my way.”