When you retired, you called your team-mates and spoke to them before making the announcement. When you quit the captaincy, you just vanished. What was that about?
When I look at it in hindsight, I could have handled it better. I didn’t want to make a fuss about it at that stage, and I think a lot of people got upset with me more about how I handled it rather than the decision in itself. So you learn from that, you learn from the mistakes.
What is your response to the impact of T20 cricket on Indian cricket?
The reality is that when I grew up, playing Test cricket was the ultimate. It mattered professionally, also in terms of making a living from this game, which does become important at some point. You had to play Test cricket consistently for a long time to do that. But now you don’t need to play Test cricket. The advent of T20 and the IPL has meant that it is possible to make an extremely good living from the game without having to play Test cricket. In the past you had only the cream at the top who were making a good living, but now it has spread a lot more and you have a lot more people who make a very good living. It is one of the great positives of T20 and the IPL.
But there is obviously the danger that players might sell themselves short. If they face stumbles or hurdles early in their Test career or in first-class cricket, there might be a few who may choose to stick to T20 because they are better at it and they are making better money from it and they don’t want to risk losing that.
India will face this challenge a lot more because a lot more Indian players play in the IPL. So how we address that challenge and go out and make people and players value Test cricket – that will come down to scheduling. We have to schedule more Test matches per year. It will come down to compensation. You’ve got to compensate Test cricketers adequately now. It’ll come down to marketing – how you market Test cricket, glorify its history. It’ll come down to coaches at junior levels, how they talk to their wards, how they inspire them about Test cricket. It’ll be about stories, it’ll be about media. Everyone will have to play their part.
There have been some good examples recently of people who have been good players in T20 and have come out and done well in Test cricket. It’s a good thing for kids to see that you can succeed in all three forms of the game. That’s important. I have no doubt that a lot of the kids playing today in the one-day and Test sides have grown up having Test cricketers to admire. But it’s kids who are my children’s age or a little older, who are now getting interested in the game for the first time and are seeing the IPL, it’s those kinds of children that we need to educate and talk to about Test cricket.
The responsibility lies with the ICC and the boards to schedule enough Test matches. They might have to make a few sacrifices in terms of money. I have no doubt that if you play enough Test matches, kids will want to play it. People might not come to the grounds that easily, and that’s why it’s important to explore other avenues – whether it is day-night cricket, the venues where we play it, and the context of Test matches. We have to accept that people don’t have the time, but there is still huge interest for Test cricket. People follow Test cricket, whether it’s on television or the internet, in India as much as elsewhere.
In the last few years, in as much as there have been fears, the number of the articles that get written about Test cricket, the number of people who follow it passionately, who talk to me about Test cricket – that hasn’t changed.
In this T20 age, how must India handle the passing of a great generation of its Test players? How can the transition be made smooth?
At some stage there is going to be a whole new generation of players. I know there are always links between one generation of players and the others; there is always a middle level of management – players who have been around and are still going to be around for a few years. Two or three guys might retire in the next couple of years, who knows? But after that there are going to be guys who are going to be around, and the responsibility is going to lie on these guys to step it up. Guys like Sehwag, Gambhir, Harbhajan, Zaheer, Dhoni himself. Not only as players but also as spokesmen. As people who decide the culture of the team, the way the team is run, the image they want to project of the team, regarding which form of the game is important to this team. It will be a group of players, who, I think, are already seniors, who will set the tone for the next generation coming through.
That cycle goes on, that cycle will go on. It’s got to move on from being the team that was led by my generation, which is already happening slowly, and will continue to do so over the next few years. I’m not saying the seniors need to be replaced. They will be the sounding boards. But the direction and the culture of the team over the next ten years will have to be decided by this capable group of young players.
Virat Kohli is now seen as the leader of the younger generation. Do you see him as your successor in the No. 3 slot?
He’s got the talent – that was obvious from the time he was an Under-19 kid. He didn’t have a really good first year at the Royal Challengers Bangalore, but you could see that there was talent. That’s not going to change. He’s got the talent to succeed at this level and it’s great to see the evolution of this kid, from what we saw at 19 to what he’s becoming now. His consistency of performance and his ability to play in different conditions and score runs in different conditions – that’s great.
And he’s got to keep doing that. As with any career and anything that you play for a long time, questions are going to be asked of him. On the technical front, on the physical front, on the mental front. On how he deals with failure, with success, with all that happens around him in Indian cricket. Questions are going to be asked about him, and how he comes up with solutions or answers is going to decide how long or how successful a career he is going to have.
Indian cricket can hope that someone like Virat, who has seemingly made that transition from a precocious talent to a performer at the international level, is able to have a long and successful career. The strength of your team is finally built around people who can have long and successful careers. You can then build a team around him and some of the other young guys.
Do you worry about where Indian cricket is at the moment – that it is going to be a very good, competitive team in ODI cricket rather than a successful Test team? Or that all of this depends on ensuring that your fast bowlers’ conveyor belt doesn’t go around so quickly?
I wouldn’t say I’m worried. I would say there are challenges that Indian cricket faces today. Some of these are challenges that have always been there in the history of our game – whether it is finding good quality fast-bowling allrounders or finding opening batsmen or finding real fast bowlers. These challenges have to be addressed, and it’s no point worrying. There are lots of positives about Indian cricket.
It’s going to be a whole new level of thinking, a whole new level of leadership, of thought, that is required. Like I said, of how the team is going to project itself. You can’t just let things flow. If we just let things happen, they will happen. You might get lucky, you might suddenly find a brilliant player or a brilliant fast-bowling allrounder from somewhere, but there needs to be serious thought put into the way the team is, what is the way forward, and how we want to see the Indian team, not today but ten years ahead.
When we got together as a group of guys in 2000, it was important for me how the team was projected. We were going through a rough patch, we had come out of this match-fixing thing. We were always known as poor travellers. It was said we were scared of fast bowling, we were arrogant, rude, or that because of match-fixing you can’t trust anyone. These were the things that you wanted to change. Ten years later, now there is another challenge. Each team has its own image; that’s what you want to change. Maybe this team now has the image where it’s said they are very good one-day players, they are not that good as Test players. You keep hearing talk about what impact the IPL might hav
e, how everyone will only want to play IPL, and how it might affect our Test cricket. Hopefully these guys will go on to challenge that notion, to show us that it is not the case.
Sharda Ugra is a senior editor at ESPNcricinfo, where this interview was first published on March 29, 2012
[ 28 ]
‘Everything that has given cricket its power has started from the fan’
RAHUL DRAVID
In December 2011, Rahul Dravid was invited to deliver the Bradman Oration in Canberra during India’s tour to Australia. His speech was wide-ranging, meticulous and memorable, touching on issues from striking a balance between the three formats, to measures against corruption in cricket.
Thank you for inviting me to deliver the Bradman Oration. The respect and the regard that came with the invitation to speak tonight are deeply appreciated.
I realise a very distinguished list of gentlemen have preceded me in the ten years that the Bradman Oration has been held. I know that this Oration is held every year to appreciate the life and career of Sir Don Bradman, a great Australian and a great cricketer. I understand that I am supposed to speak about cricket and issues in the game – and I will.
Yet first, before all else, I must say that I find myself humbled by the venue we find ourselves in. Even though there is neither a pitch in sight, nor stumps or bat and balls, as a cricketer I feel I stand on very sacred ground tonight. When I was told that I would be speaking at the National War Memorial I thought of how often and how meaninglessly the words “war”, “battle”, “fight” are used to describe cricket matches.
Yes, we cricketers devote the better part of our adult lives to being prepared to perform for our countries, to persist and compete as intensely as we can – and more. This building, however, recognises the men and women who lived out the words – war, battle, fight – for real and then gave it all up for their country, their lives left incomplete, futures extinguished.
The people of both our countries are often told that cricket is the one thing that brings Indians and Australians together. That cricket is our single common denominator. India’s first Test series as a free country was played against Australia, in November 1947, three months after our independence. Yet the histories of our countries are linked together far more deeply than we think, and further back in time than 1947.
We share something else other than cricket. Before they played the first Test match against each other, Indians and Australians fought wars together, on the same side. In Gallipoli, where, along with thousands of Australians, over 1300 Indians also lost their lives. In World War II, there were Indian and Australian soldiers in El Alamein, North Africa, in the Syria-Lebanon campaign, in Burma, in the battle for Singapore. Before we were competitors, Indians and Australians were comrades. So it is only appropriate that we are here this evening at the Australian War Memorial, where along with celebrating cricket and cricketers, we remember the unknown soldiers of both nations.
It is, however, incongruous that I, an Indian, happen to be the first cricketer from outside Australia invited to deliver the Bradman Oration. I don’t say that only because Sir Don once scored a hundred before lunch at Lord’s and my hundred at Lord’s this year took almost an entire day.
But seriously, Sir Don played just five Tests against India; that was in the first India-Australia series in 1947-48, which was to be his last season at home. He didn’t even play in India, and remains the most venerated cricketer in India not to have played there. We know that he set foot in India, though, in May 1953, when on his way to England to report on the Ashes for an English newspaper, his plane stopped in Calcutta airport. There were said to be close to a thousand people waiting to greet him. As you know, he was a very private person, and so he got into an army jeep and rushed into a barricaded building, annoyed with the airline for having “breached confidentiality”. That was all Indians of the time saw of Bradman, who remains a mythical figure.
For one generation of fans in my country, those who grew up in the 1930s, when India was still under British rule, Bradman represented a cricketing excellence that belonged to somewhere outside England. To a country taking its first steps in Test cricket that meant something. His success against England at that time was thought of as our personal success. He was striking one for all of us ruled by the common enemy. Or as your country has so poetically called them, the Poms.
There are two stories that I thought I should bring to your notice. June 28, 1930, the day Bradman scored 254 at Lord’s against England, was also the day Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested by the police. Nehru was, at the time, one of the most prominent leaders of the Indian independence movement, and later, independent India’s first prime minister. The coincidence of the two events was noted by a young boy, KN Prabhu, who was both nationalist and cricket fan and later became independent India’s foremost cricket writer. In the ‘30s, as Nehru went in and out of jail, Bradman went after the England bowling, and for KN Prabhu he became a kind of avenging angel.
There’s another story I’ve heard, about the day in 1933 when the news reached India that Bradman’s record for the highest Test score of 334 had been broken by Wally Hammond. As much as we love our records, they say some Indian fans at the time were not exactly happy. Now, there’s a tale that a few even wanted to wear black bands to mourn the fact that this precious record that belonged to Australia – and by extension, us – had gone back. To an Englishman. We will never know if this is true, if black bands were ever worn, but as journalists sometimes tell me, why let facts get in the way of a good story.
My own link with Bradman was much like that of most other Indians – through history books, some old video footage and his wise words. About leaving the game better than you found it. About playing it positively, as Bradman, then a selector, told Richie Benaud before the 1960-61 West Indies tour of Australia. Of sending the right message out from cricket to its public. Of players being temporary trustees of a great game.
While there may be very little similarity in our records or our strike rates or our fielding – and I can say this only today, in front of all of you – I am actually pleased that I share something very important with Sir Don.
He was, primarily, like me, a No. 3 batsman.
It is a tough, tough job. We’re the ones who make life easier for the kings of batting, the middle order that follows us. Bradman did that with a bit more success and style than I did. He dominated bowling attacks and put bums on seats; if I bat for any length of time I am more likely to bore people to sleep. Still, it is nice to have batted for a long time in a position whose benchmark is, in fact, the benchmark for batsmanship itself.
Before he retired from public life in his 80s, I do know that Bradman watched Sunil Gavaskar’s generation play a series in Australia. I remember the excitement that went through Indian cricket when we heard the news that Bradman had seen Sachin Tendulkar bat on TV and thought he batted like him. It was more than mere approval, it was as if the great Don had finally passed on his torch. Not to an Aussie or an Englishman or a West Indian. But to one of our own.
One of the things Bradman said has stayed in my mind. That the finest of athletes had, along with skill, a few more essential qualities: the ability to conduct their life with dignity, with integrity, with courage and modesty. All this, he believed, was totally compatible with pride, ambition, determination and competitiveness. Maybe those words should be put up in cricket dressing rooms all over the world.
As all of you know, Don Bradman passed away on February 25, 2001, two days before the India v Australia series was to begin in Mumbai. Whenever an important figure in cricket leaves us, cricket’s global community pauses in the midst of contests and debates to remember what he represented, what he stood for, and Bradman was the pinnacle. The standard against which all Test batsmen must take guard.
The series that followed two days after Bradman’s death later went on to
become what many believe was one of the greatest in cricket. It is a series, I’d like to believe, he would have enjoyed following. A fierce contest between bat and ball went down to the final session of the final day of the final Test. Between an Australian team that had risen to their most imposing powers and a young Indian team determined to rewrite some chapters of its own history.
The 2001 series contained high-quality cricket from both sides and had a deep impact on the careers of those who played a part in it. The Australians were near unbeatable in the first half of the new decade, both home and away. As others floundered against them, India became the only team that competed with them on even terms.
India kept answering questions put to them by the Australians and asking a few themselves. The quality demanded of those contests, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes uplifting, made us, the Indian team, grow and rise. As individuals, we were asked to play to the absolute outer limits of our capabilities, and we often extended them.
When we toured in 2007-08, I thought it was going to be my last tour of Australia. The Australians thought it was going to be the last time they would be seeing Sachin Tendulkar on their shores. He received warm standing ovations from wonderful crowds all around the country. Well, like a few creaking Terminators, we’re back. Older, wiser and, I hope, improved.
If both teams look back to their 2007-08 series in Australia, they will know that they should have done things a little differently in the Sydney Test. But I think both sides have moved on from there; we’ve played each other twice in India already and relations between the two teams are much better than they have been as far as I can remember.
Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Page 18