Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel Read online

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  ISBN 978-93-81810-78-1

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Your regular, everyday superstar > Sambit Bal

  THE CRICKETER

  Extravagantly sound > Mukul Kesavan

  The talent myth > Suresh Menon

  The man who acquired greatness > Sambit Bal

  The grit to be great > Sanjay Manjrekar

  A cricketer most evolved > Aakash Chopra

  The job he fell out of love with > Sidharth Monga

  ‘The best batting happens when you are batting in the present’ > Sambit Bal

  IN THE WORDS OF HIS PEERS

  The rock around whom the rest moved > John Wright

  A gentleman champion of timeless steel and dignity > Ed Smith

  The eternal student > Greg Chappell

  The master will see you now (and always) > Suresh Raina

  ‘I didn’t beat him more than a ball in a row’ > Jason Gillespie

  His team, his time > Rahul Bhattachariya

  THE GREAT INNINGS

  Kolkata 2001: Hercules on second fiddle > Sidharth Monga

  Leeds 2002: The monk of Headingley > Sanjay Bangar

  Adelaide 2003: Twin treatises in courage > Rohit Brijnath

  Rawalpindi 2004: Notes from an ugly epic > Rahul Bhattacharya

  Jamaica 2006: The Kingston grind > Siddhartha Vaidyanathan

  Nottingham 2011: A part of his best self > Sharda Ugra

  ‘There are no easy catches in the slips’ > Nagraj Gollapudi

  THE MAN

  Dignity, grace, conscience > Rohit Brijnath

  A sportsman of model decorum > Gideon Haigh

  The reason I got married > Jarrod Kimber

  The money moment > Samir Chopra

  Start as you mean to go on > Fazal Khaleel

  My husband the perfectionist > Vijeeta Dravid

  ‘When you’ve played at the top, it’s hard to settle for second-best’ > Interview by Sharda Ugra

  ‘Everything that has given cricket its power has started from the fan’ > Rahul Dravid

  THE NUMBERS

  The man they couldn’t move > S Rajesh

  Records

  Acknowledgements

  Your regular, everyday superstar

  SAMBIT BAL

  A t Rahul Dravid’s retirement press conference, most things ran along expected lines. Dravid came dressed smartly – white shirt, black jacket, hair neatly combed – looking boyish, studious and a bit nervous. His family trooped in behind him; Anil Kumble sat by his side and Javagal Srinath and GR Viswanath in the first row. There was the familiar chaos at the start, with photographers crowding the dais and being heckled by their mates.

  To those who knew him, Dravid’s retirement would not have come as a surprise. The manner of his departure bore the stamp of the man: not for him the fanfare of a build-up to a farewell Test, the showmanship of a final doffing of the hat, or a milking of emotions.

  He wouldn’t be human if he hadn’t wished for a better finish than the airy, un-Dravid-like waft that carried the ball into the lap of gully in his final innings, in Adelaide, but he was mature and pragmatic enough to accept that fairytale endings are a matter of chance: it would have been futile trying to wait for one or to try to manufacture one.

  Dravid read from a prepared text. The words were carefully chosen – no flash, not overly sentimental, a long list of thank yous, and one poignant sentence at the end that was perfect headline material. Kumble too read out a tribute that had all the right words, and a touch of humour.

  The twist, and the tears (well, almost) came from the most unlikely quarter. During his years with the BCCI, N Srinivasan, who also runs India Cements, has cultivated the image of a tough and taciturn overlord who takes no prisoners. Unlike Dravid and Kumble, he spoke extempore. He was eloquent and emotional, and because they came from the heart, his words resonated in the room.

  It was a lovely passage on its own, for it allowed those present a rare glimpse of the softer side of the most powerful man in Indian cricket, and arguably world cricket. Those who have known him for long talk about Srinivasan’s love for cricket, but in recent times the BCCI president’s public image has been that of an authoritarian, even somewhat uncaring, figure. But on this day his obvious affection for Dravid drew out the cricket lover in him.

  Dravid can have that effect on people, on those who genuinely love the game, those who have been drawn to cricket by its wholesome and timeless qualities, its intellectual dimensions, and its innate grace and beauty. In many ways Dravid personified many aspects of Test cricket that fans find appealing.

  It was remarkable, but hardly surprising, that his retirement evoked as many appreciations in the media that were about the cricketer as much as they were about the person. Dravid was perceptive enough to notice the difference between the obligatory platitudes that are part of the journalistic routine for such occasions and the sincerity in the tributes that came his way. What was touching, he said, was that it was obvious that people had taken the time to think about what they wrote, not merely dashed off pieces that were mandated.

  The reason is straightforward. Dravid the cricketer was immense, but the man is just as exceptional, if not more so, which is amazing, because to remain a successful athlete at the highest level for as long as he did requires a degree of self-absorption and even narcissism. This is not to suggest that there aren’t nice men in sport – in fact, Indian cricket was blessed that it had so many at the same time – but rarely does sport allow its successful practitioners to develop rounded personalities.

  In a sense, that was Dravid’s biggest triumph. It would be hard to find a cricketer who was as devoted and consumed by his craft, or one who spent as much time polishing it, but he also found energy and time to understand and engage with the world outside cricket. He often compared the life of the Indian cricketer to a fish bowl, but for himself he was determined never to be trapped. It was good to know him – not in the sense of how it feels good to know a superstar, but because he made it possible for you to engage with him at a normal level. He was earnest and curious, and had varied interests. He would ask me as many questions about my profession as I did him about his.

  My profession demands the discipline of keeping a distance from your subjects. With Dravid that code was broken. It’s not
that I cultivated a friendship with him deliberately. It developed organically over the years, over phone calls about the occasional pieces he wrote for us, over meals on tours, over chats about parenting and books, over shared thoughts and interests. That none of it has ever felt wrong has been down to the kind of person he is.

  There is a normalcy about him that is almost abnormal. There are public figures who go out of their way to put you at ease, but the effort involved is palpable. Dravid does it just by being himself. There is no affectation and artifice involved. Not that he is unaware of his stardom or is falsely modest about his achievements, but he can step outside all that and connect with the world at a real level.

  It’s almost as if he leaves that part of his life behind him when he leaves the cricket field. And perhaps that’s why he can see cricket from the outside, reflect on it objectively, and see the ironies and futilities of stardom. It’s a rare and remarkable quality. It has helped him engage in relationships in the outside world without baggage.

  It made him one of the rare cricketers a journalist could afford to be friends with without compromising on professionalism. Through the years our relationship has never been hostage to what was written about him on ESPNcricinfo under my watch. You could write about a poor performance or a poor run of scores from Dravid without worrying about his response, because he understood that you had to be honest to your job, like he did.

  The very first time I spoke to him was to ask him, over the phone, if he would write a piece on Sachin Tendulkar on the occasion of his 100th Test. I didn’t know what to expect, but Dravid agreed, and insisted he would write it himself. We didn’t discuss a fee. He wrote for us a few times after that, and each time the copy would turn up neat. There would be times he would call to tweak a line or two. He would later tell me that he had got a friend to look through the copy before he sent it over, which was impressive, given the prevailing culture of player columns, where some players first read pieces that run under their bylines – if they do so at all – after they are published.

  Apart from my first long and satisfying interview with him in 2003, after he had batted India to a win in the Adelaide Test, he didn’t submit to another until the end of the English summer of 2011, which turned out to be, for him personally, one of the greatest of his career. In six of the eight Test innings he was forced to open in difficult conditions, and in the Oval Test, after carrying his bat through in the first innings, as his team-mates combusted around him, he was back facing the new ball late in the day, when England enforced the follow-on.

  That was the theme through his career: when a tough job needed to be done, it was Dravid India turned to. He didn’t like opening, but he did open. First slip was his natural habitat, but he yielded the position because a team-mate with a bad back found it difficult to stand at second. He did the tough press conferences. And at the fag end of his career, he made his international T20 debut, long after he had opted out of format, because India were struggling to put together an XI.

  I asked him if he ever felt like the sacrificial lamb. I was convinced he did.

  Dravid’s response was disarmingly simple. “I never saw it that way. To me it felt like I was being trusted to do a tough job by the team. It made me feel valued.”

  I spoke to him again after the tour of Australia, where he seemed to find every conceivable way there is of getting bowled. His mind was almost made up about retirement. I asked him if, with the benefit of hindsight, he now regretted not taking the opportunity to leave on a high after the tour of England. He would have gone, he said, if he had had a poor series. But having done so well, he felt obliged to travel to Australia, where the team had never won a Test series. And no, there were no regrets.

  Indian cricket may find a batsman as capable, but to find a man as exceptional is likely to be far tougher.

  This book, a collection of fresh pieces and ones previously published on ESPNcricinfo and in some of its sister publications, is an exploration of the cricketer and the man, and it employs a wide range of voices – those of writers, team-mates, opponents, and even Dravid’s wife.

  Some of these articles have been edited, rewritten and expanded – the piece by Vijeeta Dravid, who has not only looked after their home but been her husband’s best sounding board, is longer here than the version that appeared on the website, and the interview with Dravid after his retirement, too, is an unabridged version.

  This book doesn’t purport to be definitive, but in its five sections – the batsman and what he meant to Indian cricket, impressions by team-mates and other peers, his finest innings, personal accounts of the man, and interviews with Dravid over the years – it aims to provide a well-rounded portrait of a cricketer who made competitiveness and grace perfect companions, and brought dignity to his sport even as he fought fiercely in his team’s corner.

  Sambit Bal is the editor of ESPNcricinfo

  The cricketer

  Without too much effort Dravid could also keep his head when all about him were losing theirs and blaming it on him, as well as trust himself when all men doubted him. His approach to sport, and indeed life itself, has been Kiplingesque.

  Suresh Menon, The talent myth, page 18

  [ 1 ]

  Extravagantly sound

  MUKUL KESAVAN

  Is Rahul Dravid a great batsman? If this is the big question, there’s a flotilla of more specific questions that follow it in close formation. Is Dravid the greatest batsman ever to represent India? Does he have a claim to being the greatest batsman in the world today?

  To play sublime innings every now and then isn’t enough. On this score Dravid was the most dependable batsman India ever produced, statistically more reliable than Gavaskar, which is a staggering achievement. I’d argue that Gavaskar faced the greater challenges: he opened the batting against better fast bowlers without a helmet, but a batsman can only play to the conditions he’s given, so that can’t be held against Dravid. You could also argue that Tendulkar in his pomp averaged roughly what Dravid did in his, and that he made those runs at a greater rate, and that would be true.

  It’s also true that to compare the figures of a completed career against one that’s still a work in progress is misleading: averages taper off towards the end of a player’s span. Dravid finished in the early 50s, which is where Gavaskar ended his wonderful career. Still, the fact that a pessimistic forecast has Dravid declining to Gavaskar’s statistical level, says something about the height at which he currently stands.

  On pretty much every count Dravid’s record is outstanding. He has by far the best record for an Indian batsman away from home, a crucial statistic for a team that’s notoriously shaky at dealing with foreign conditions. In wisden.com’s list of the top 100 innings, Dravid’s best centuries were ranked higher than Tendulkar’s.

  But figures aren’t everything. If they were, we wouldn’t be asking the question we started with. Nobody asks it of Lara or Tendulkar anymore; we know they are great batsmen. So why, despite the massive consistency of his record, do we not take Dravid’s greatness for granted?

  The simple answer is that Dravid played all his cricket in the shadow of Tendulkar, regarded by most critics as the greatest batsman in the history of Indian cricket. By the time Dravid began playing Test cricket, Tendulkar was a Test star of about seven years’ standing. If the early nineties belonged to Lara, the second half of the decade was Tendulkar’s. The seal on Tendulkar’s pre-eminence was affixed by Don Bradman himself, when he observed that Tendulkar’s batsmanship resembled his own. It is natural for a young batsman to supersede the champion of the previous generation, as in the manner in which Tendulkar replaced Mohammad Azharuddin. But prodigies like Tendulkar upset this sequence: to Dravid, three months older than the great Mumbaikar, it must have sometimes seemed that he had been sentenced to second fiddle for life.

  But through the first half of the 20
00s Dravid, by sheer weight of runs, was the most valuable batsman in the Indian side. That his peak coincided with a relative decline in Tendulkar’s performance underlined his pre-eminence. Journalists and commentators everywhere acknowledged with respect and admiration Dravid’s achievement, but there was no great rush to celebrate the arrival of a new “great”. It is the fate of low-profile high performers to be taken for granted.

  Also, Dravid is a great defensive batsman and the label “great” is generally applied to batsmen who dominate the bowling, whose preferred style, as with Lara and Tendulkar, is attack, not attrition. Attacking batsmen are sexier than defensive ones. Had Tendulkar in his pomp not walked in at his assigned position in the batting order, collective disappointment would have rustled round the arena. Not so with Dravid. He never made your pulse race; acknowledging the greatness of those who do, like Viv Richards or Tendulkar, comes more easily, more naturally.

  But this can’t be the whole explanation. Gavaskar played most of his innings in defensive mode and the Indian cricketing public wasted no time in hailing him as the greatest ever. This had something to do with his record-breaking debut series, where he scored 774 runs in four Tests with four centuries and three fifties. In the greatness stakes, getting off to an early start helps (Tendulkar), as does an explosive one (Gavaskar).

  The fact that Gavaskar was an opening batsman invested his innings with drama: there’s something about an opening batsman facing down fast bowlers that is dramatic and exciting in itself. Also, Gavaskar generally closed out his centuries, unlike Dravid, who through the first half of his career had the frustrating habit of getting himself out in the eighties and nineties. But even allowing for these differences, it’s curious that we admire Dravid where once we stood in awe of Gavaskar.