Very rarely people can, I think, step out of something they’ve done for 23 years and attain the same standards in whatever they do. When you are used to playing at that top level, it’s hard to accept that sometimes you have to settle for being second-best. I guess that’s the way it’s going to be. You can’t expect a guy at 40-41 to become “world class” at something else.
What do retired players tell you about coping?
I have spoken to people who have retired, and especially coaches. Whether it’s been conversations with Kapil Dev or through the years with John [Wright], Greg [Chappell], Gary [Kirsten], and even Duncan [Fletcher] now. All of them have gone through that, and they say it takes a bit of time to get used to. You get used to it and then there are new things to challenge you and you must move on. Each one is different, I guess.
Before you actually retired, was there a time in your career that you were so fed up that you actually wanted to throw it all away?
Obviously the period just after the World Cup when we lost, in 2007, was difficult. It was the first phase in my career, other than the first couple of years when I was establishing myself, that I got dropped from the one-day side. Other than that I had a pretty smooth run for a long time. That was tough in terms of some of my performances, that whole period, 2007-08, getting knocked out of the World Cup and not performing so well after I gave up the captaincy, for a while. I think that was a really hard period, when I questioned myself a lot and wondered whether it had all just disappeared and gone away.
I thought I’d really had a good run and I could have walked away in 2008 and felt pretty comfortable with what I had done and achieved, and I wouldn’t have regretted it at all. Because I’ve always tried to do my best – you’ve always got to try to be the best you can be and hope that the results fall your way. If it hadn’t worked out, it hadn’t worked out. But I was lucky to get a chance to play a couple of years of cricket.
How much was working on your fitness a part of pushing yourself through the last four or five years from then on?
I spent two-three years working with Paul Chapman, who was the strength and conditioning coach at the NCA, and with the NCA’s physios and trainers, on raising the bar of my fitness. I was lucky that we had all those people here. I saw in those physios and trainers, and in Paul, a resource – really good professional people who could help me. And I sort of decided to utilise that completely. I did make a conscious effort to try and raise the bar of my fitness, because if I wanted to keep playing at this age, I didn’t want any of the younger guys or people in the field to feel that I wasn’t fit enough to be there.
Sometimes performances you can or can’t control, but fitness, I think, to a large extent you can control. I’m not saying you can control everything in fitness – there are a lot of guys who have injuries, who, whatever they do and whatever they try, sadly they can’t do much about it. But in most things, fitness and diet and stuff like that, you have responsibility over it.
Sometimes you practise and work hard and still things don’t pan out. But fitness is a lot simpler. I said, “Look, I’ll make an effort to be as fit as I’ve been.” While I did try, it was hard to say I’ve been at my fittest. In some areas I was fitter than I was at 24-25 and in some areas I was not. But I’d like to believe that till I finished my career, I set a pretty high standard of fitness for myself, and that I didn’t let anybody down in terms of the effort I put in, in terms of my physical fitness.
Did it have a direct impact on your game in the last few years?
It’s hard to co-relate the two. You do perform better when you’re fit, you do feel better about yourself, but it’s hard to say. Even when I was doing badly in 2007-08, I was pretty fit. Was I really fitter in England last year than I was in 2007 when I was doing badly? Really, no. Probably I was fitter back then when I was in England, so no. Sometimes fitness is a good thing to have but you have to recognise that fitness takes you only so far, and skills are the most important thing.
Fitness just helps you execute those cricketing skills for longer and more consistently, maybe. If someone thinks, “I’ll spend the off season working on my fitness and I’ll come back a better cricketer,” I don’t think that’s enough. You need to spend a lot of time working on your skills and honing your skills.
When cricketers go into their late 30s do they sense what the outside world observes as a fading of their skills? Slowing down of reflexes, eyesight etc?
I didn’t sense it like that personally, but maybe we are trained not to sense it, who knows? Maybe sometimes these things are better judged from outside. As a player you will never admit to weakness, to a slowing down of skills. You’re trained not to admit these things. You have bad patches when you are 24-25, and it’s only when you have bad patches after 35-36 that people say your skills are down, the eyesight is gone. Maybe it has nothing to do with age and you’re just going through bad form and you happen to be 35. After 35, I felt as fit in terms of physical fitness – if you judge fitness in terms of sprinting a distance, running a distance, whatever yo-yo tests we have and weights you lift – as I was when I was playing my best cricket, at 28-29. I was probably doing more in terms of some things now than I was when I was young.
How do you judge eyesight? If you go to a doctor and ask him, he will say you’ve still got 20-20 vision. Maybe [time] just wears you down – the travelling, the pressure, the dealing with expectations, those things slowly start chipping away, chipping away. It’s hard to put a date to it and say, “Now it’s started decreasing and now it has decreased.”
The best explanation I’ve heard for this is that mentally sometimes you are fresher when you are younger. You’ve not been worn down so much. So your response to defeat, failure, success, pressure is better. As you get older, the freshness gets lost, the sense of excitement. Like what you experience the first time you walk into Lord’s. After you’ve been there three or four times, maybe that sense of wonder goes. That’s the best explanation for why after a period of dealing with some of the same things they become more difficult, rather than a fading of skill.
Australia must have been the tour from hell? You went there with the best intentions, the best preparation, and it all went badly. What went wrong?
I think Australia was disappointing. In England I felt we had quite a few injuries and I just felt we weren’t as well prepared as we were in Australia. Australia, I thought we went there with the best of intentions, the guys cared. They played better, they pitched the ball up, we had some opportunities in the first Test we didn’t grab. We had them at some 210 for 6 and then they got 320 and we were about 220 for 2, and Sachin got out that evening and I got out next morning. Having said that, you have got to give them credit. They bowled well, pitched the ball up, they swung the ball.
From a personal point of view? All the bowleds?
It was disappointing. You set high standards for yourself. I felt that getting out is getting out and obviously constantly getting out…
So it really doesn’t matter whether you were out caught, lbw, stumped, bowled, whatever?
I don’t like getting out, period. How it happens is almost irrelevant. But yeah, obviously it happened a few times more than I would have liked, no doubt about it. The beauty of it is that now I don’t have to worry about it.
But those are challenges you face all your life. I think that is what differentiates people who play for long periods of time from others, because they keep getting asked questions. Top bowlers and top bowling attacks keep asking you different questions. For some it is getting out in a particular way, for some it is the ability to play spin, for some to play pace. For some it is a different bowler, a unique angle, on a different wicket. These questions keep getting asked and you have to constantly keep coming up with answers. Most of the guys that I know who have played over a period of time have constantly been able to find answers to the ques
tions that keep getting asked. You become a problem-solver, a solution-finder. I’d like to believe that if I had continued, I would hopefully have worked on this area [getting bowled] and got better at it.
Given that you are seen as a classical, almost old-fashioned, Test player, and you know your history, is there an era in the game you would have liked to have played in?
When I think about the fact that I had helmets, I think I’m happy to have played in this era. Playing some of those West Indian quicks and some of those guys without a helmet must have been a frightening proposition.
You were a No. 3 in the mould largely of an opening batsman. So do you think that coming into a line-up full of stroke-makers actually worked for your game, as much as you lent solidity to it? Imagine being the No. 3 after an opening combination of Boycott and Tavaré.
I think we all complemented each other. The fact that we did quite well in the last decade, home and away, with our ups and downs, was because of a batting line-up that complemented each other. There were stroke-makers, there were guys who played spin in a particular way, guys who were more solid… throw in a left-hander in the middle. We complemented each other quite well, we fed off each other. I think we played a role, in each helping the other one do as well as they have done.
Veeru [Sehwag] and Gautam Gambhir have come in and done quite well and played a role too. I think I had a role, and I helped some of the guys play better. The ability to wear out some of the bowlers did help our stroke-makers. The fact that some of them played more strokes allowed me to sometimes play in a way that I could play or felt most comfortable playing. Over the course of time we also found our niche, our own places. We all played for such a long time together that we worked out what was comfortable for us, and it seemed to gel well and it worked for the team as well.
You have the world record for the most century partnerships. When you look back, do batting partners have what they say doubles players do in tennis – a chemistry that builds? Or is it just familiarity?
It partly builds with familiarity. Once you’ve been around each other a long time and played together a long time, it does help – it’s a comfort factor. You have some memories to go back to constantly. It does help when you have a guy at the other end who knows your game well and sometimes can just point out a few things, or knows exactly when you’re getting casual or you’re not concentrating. For me it’s worked well with all the guys I’ve played with. Over the course of time it has built. I’ve had a good record with Veeru, Sachin, Laxman, because we’ve played together a long time.
In a partnership, you don’t change your game. The conversations are different. Each one has his own unique conversations with you and you have your conversation with them. With Veeru, as you would expect, it’s probably a casual conversation – he brings that side out of you.
What do you talk about? Technique?
I know people go after Veeru’s technique a lot, but to be a positive player you have to have a very solid technique. Technique is not only about being able to defend balls. If you are able to play positively, it means you are getting yourself in the right position at the right time and doing it quicker and better than someone else. That in itself is a technique, and it’s just that there’s an attacking technique and a defensive technique. I think both are important. Some guys are better at their defensive technique and some guys have a better attacking technique. Both of them are techniques.
So with Veeru, it’s a lot more casual and relaxed. If you asked him, he would say, “I’m actually quite serious with Rahul”, but his level of seriousness… Veeru is always asking you to play shots.
With Sachin – we don’t talk a lot, but I think we know, we respect and know each other enough to go and tell the other that maybe you are relaxing, you need to tighten up a bit. There’s quite a lot of information that is exchanged.
With Laxman – we’ve played a lot together in junior cricket, so again we have a few key things we say to each other, and we keep encouraging each other. We don’t talk too much about technique, we just encourage each other a lot.
With Ganguly it’s, “Don’t just hog the strike when the spinner is bowling, and get me on the strike as well, buddy.”
One of the things you’ve said about batting is that it is a meditative experience. When you come in at 3 for 1, India is fighting to save a game, how is that possible?
You can’t think about these things when you are batting and the bowler is running in at you. That is, I guess, the meditative aspect of it. It sort of focuses you on one thing, and that’s meditation, I guess: the ability to focus on a particular thing by removing everything else – the score, the situation. You can’t be thinking about all these things, so you try to get that one particular focus, which, I guess, is the cricket ball. If you have to be a successful batsman you have to be able to focus on the ball. You can’t be thinking about a hundred things, you can’t.
But you did take to meditation itself as a tool for preparation?
I took to it quite young. I was just drawn to it. I did it a couple of times at 18-19, some basic form of meditation. I think I got better with age. It started off with trying to do some relaxation, to just calm myself down in some ways. And I’ve experimented with a few things, not out-of-body experiences or anything, but I just found that it was a great way to relax and switch off.
I was a bit of an anxious teenager. I would worry a lot and was quite a shy young kid in some ways. Though I always believed I had the ability to look at the positive side of a lot of things. Even in the most difficult situations, it was very seldom that I would get down on myself and keep moping. I would always look ahead. I think I was more anxious about the future rather than worrying about the past. I would get more anxious about what might happen – what’s next, how will I cope with it? So I think things like meditation and just being calm and relaxed definitely did help me come through that, especially when I was a youngster.
What kind of routines did you have when you prepared for games? Were they different for Tests and ODIs?
They were just a few basic things, it wasn’t too much. You had to be flexible. You couldn’t say this was the only thing that I did and I didn’t do anything else.
One of the things was that I didn’t like to get rushed on the morning of a game. So I got up a lot earlier, took my time doing things, just eased into things. But again, you had to be flexible about practices. Sometimes you got good facilities, sometimes you didn’t. I just wanted to feel comfortable. When I went into a Test match, I wanted to feel ready, like I’d practised hard enough, I’d hit enough balls, physically I’d done what I needed to do. Mentally again, I’d done the preparation, and I felt in a good, calm space where I was eager to perform without being too anxious. Or being too stressed or tense about what might happen.
To be fair, I never always reached it. It’s very difficult to do always. The constant process is to always try to sort of reach that. Because once you’ve experienced it, and seen that, you want that to be the template. But as long as you are trying to achieve that or striving to achieve that, then you get there or thereabouts at most times. Which is all I tried to do. I tried to give myself the best chance. It is not that every time I cracked it I’d be in the same perfect state of mind, of course not. But I’d like to believe I got most things done, in terms of my preparation leading into a game. If you got enough sleep, you were more relaxed in the morning leading into the game. I did visualisation sometimes, on and off and when I felt like it, not all the time. Even with the meditation stuff, as I became better at it, I didn’t need to do it every time.
What is the biggest challenge of being a No. 3 in international cricket these days? Do you believe a decade of batsmanship is now going to be followed by the age of the bowlers?
I felt that, even in 2000 there were good attacks. You look at any attack that had McGrath, Lee, Gilles
pie – that was a good attack.
I don’t know if the challenges for the No. 3 have been any different. You have to sometimes go in when the ball is new, so lots of times you’re playing the new ball really, which is part of the challenge. It’s also a position where sometimes the openers might have a good partnership, so you’ve been waiting a while. It’s almost a state of readiness you have to be in because you might have to go in in the first over or you might not go in for a long time. That might be true for a No. 3 but the Nos. 4, 5, 6 have a little more breathing space. They can wait a little for the first wicket to fall before they know that they might need to go in early. If an opening partnership develops, a No. 4 can afford to relax and settle down and switch off a little bit because he knows that even if a wicket falls, the No. 3 will go in and I can have a little time to switch on and get ready. In that sense, the No. 3 doesn’t have that. But I don’t think that has been different for any generation.
Is not the game itself changing, the pace of Test cricket itself – fewer draws?
Fewer draws is a good thing because people are playing more shots. There’s no doubt that people want to play shots, they want to score quicker, and it does sometimes compromise your defensive technique. It does, and you know it’s a trade-off. There are risks when you do that and you have to weigh the risks and play the shots. It makes for a more exciting brand of cricket when people see wickets fall and runs being scored, which is good, but also sometimes there are times when you need to have the ability to see off difficult periods.
Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Page 16