Rahul Dravid: My God of cricket

Now, Dravid just plays Tests, 14-20 innings in an year, and is always under scrutiny. One failure, and people want him to hang up his boots, in stark contrast to other players who have the chance to redeem themselves in the ODIs and T20s if they fail in Tests.

Unfazed by all these questions and scrutiny, Dravid is still silently going about doing his job, that being guiding India to famous Test wins on foreign soil.

Soon he will be standing at the same place where he started his journey in the international Test arena for the fourth and probably the last time. Another circle will be completed. From there on, how long Dravid will extend the arc, nobody knows. But sooner or later he will hang up his boots and so will Sachin Tendulkar. They both will walk away holding their heads high – one will go out with all the glory and spotlight, and the other will just silently walk away into oblivion.

Dravid could never manage to be in the media spotlight even when he was active in ODIs. How can we expect him to remain in the limelight after his retirement? With Sachin around, the media probably has enough on their plate. They don’t feel like talking about anyone else. That’s why Sachin completed his 50th 100 in Test matches and everybody rejoiced, but Dravid completed 12,000 runs in the same match and nobody realised.

One will remain etched in the memories of crores of Indians with the list of all the records and the tag of ‘God Of cricket’, and the other will just vanish.

But one thing makes me wonder. Would Sachin have been able to amass all that glory and all those records had Rahul not been there?

Case Study: India vs England at Leeds in August 2002. A deadly pitch and some furious bowling. Rahul Dravid and Sanjay Bangar put up a brave front. Bangar went on to score 80-odd runs while Dravid made a fighting 148. But in the same innings Sachin scored 193 runs. In spite of which, it was Dravid who was awarded the Man of the match award because everybody realised that the amount of grit, courage, struggle and sweat that went into those 193 was not even half of what went into those 148.

The above is a prime example of how Dravid usually makes it easier for the later batsmen to score runs. By the time Sachin or Sourav arrived, the bowlers were already tired and frustrated, the bounce and movement had decreased and the dew had evaporated.

It is a well-known fact that Sachin prefers to not leave his No. 4 spot (except probably for a night-watchman). Even after being a regular opener in ODIs, he would never volunteer to bat as a makeshift opener in Tests if need be. He always prefers the top three batsmen to take the shine away from the ball, and who better than Dravid to do that job?

I wonder: if Dravid was not there to score those 148, could Sachin still have gone on to score those 193? Maybe, or maybe not. We will never truly know. Dravid, though, has played not just one, but many such innings.

As they say, in a temple, even ‘God’ lives behind and is protected by ‘The Wall’. If there was no ‘Wall’ to weather the storm as Dravid himself puts it, I don’t know how much greatness the ‘God’ could have achieved. It will always remain an unresolved debate whether Dravid’s brilliance at No. 3 had anything to do with Sachin’s mountain of runs. Would Sachin still have got those many runs had Rahul not been there at No. 3? There is no genius intelligent enough or super-computer advanced enough to estimate or compute Dravid’s contribution to Sachin’s greatness. And we will never know. But I don’t care.

The Writing is on The ‘Wall’

For me, Rahul Dravid is the God of cricket. When I stand outside the ‘temple of cricket’, I wouldn’t care about the ‘God’ sitting inside. I’d rather bow to the battered and bruised ‘Wall’ outside and walk away.

Lately, cricket has become a dirty game of slogging, edges and ugly unorthodox sixes and fours. The batsmen play all sorts of weird strokes which resemble tennis, golf or baseball shots. There is also one ‘helicopter shot’. A few people call it ‘gully cricket’. I call it Ugly Cricket.

Thank God I have Rahul Dravid. His drives are still awesome and his hooks, pulls and square cuts are still divine. I’ll watch cricket for as long as Rahul Dravid playing his shots.

Love you, RD. But more than that, I respect you for all that you have done for cricket, for Team India, and for me. You are a hero. Maybe unsung, but still a hero.