5 modern day cricket legends who prematurely resigned from captaincy

#4 Rahul Dravid

Rahul Dravid is remembered as one of India’s best batsmen and probably thenicest guy cricket has ever seen

Rahul Dravid, who made his debut for the Indian cricket team at Lord’s in 1996 scoring 95 and ended his career as one of the legends of the game, faced tough times with captaincy. His overall career as a batsman is next only to Sachin Tendulkar: 13,288 runs in 164 matches, with 36 hundreds at an average of 52.31.

He took over the captaincy from Sourav Ganguly and performed this role for around 2 years. In that period, he captained India for 20 Tests and 62 ODIs. Under his leadership, India won 8 Tests, highlight being the series wins in West Indies, Bangladesh and England. As Captain, he averaged 51 in Tests and 44 in ODIs.

His ODI Captaincy record was a bit of a mix; it began with India recording 16 consecutive successful chases, but first-round exit from the World Cup was the lowest point.

Ultimately, when he was 34, he resigned from captaincy to focus on his batting. This came shortly before the Australian series. His batting average went down during the series against England (25) and South Africa (21). He said “I enjoyed the captaincy, I loved it, but it can get tough after a while and some of the enjoyment can go away,"

When he resigned, he also requested the Indian Cricket Board not to consider him for ICC World Twenty20, which India won under their new leader – MS Dhoni.