Rahul Dravid: Timeless Steel

by Chappell, Greg

  I think the reason for this has to do with Dravid’s style of batsmanship. Spectators and cricket writers reserve their highest praise for batsmanship that seems effortless. The oohs that follow Tendulkar’s attenuated straight drive, the high-elbow one minus follow-through, are our tributes to magic. What timing! Genius!

  Dravid’s batting style was the opposite of effortless. It was elaborate, flourishing and effortful. You seldom applauded a Dravid stroke for its velocity or timing. Energetic hook shots dribbled over the boundary line. Drives were hit hard into the ground, and nothing was ever hit on the up. Every shot was preceded by a high, flourishing backlift, but unlike Lara, whose backlift ended in high-risk shot-making, Dravid’s arabesques more often than not resulted in the ball being dropped by his feet for a single. And the man-in-a-bunker effect was exaggerated by the stance: low, dogged, sweat running off him in rivulets.

  Dravid didn’t fit into the rudimentary templates that the great art of coarse cricket writing has invented for batsmen. Here a sound technique always implies a “compact defence”. Well, Dravid’s defence wasn’t compact: it was extravagant. His wrists twirled, his bat looped before the ball was disciplined into the ground. Dravid was a great batsman who could do everything: he hooked, pulled, cut, swept, flicked and drove, but his entire technique was centred on the need to make sure that the ball hit the ground first. To that end he played the ball later than any batsman in cricket; so late that more often than not the ball would ricochet off an angled bat and hit the ground at a steep angle. Dravid’s apparent effortfulness, his sadhu-like indifference to the sex appeal of shots hit on the up, the absence of ooh-making timing, were symptoms of his decision to sacrifice velocity, to reduce risk. The reason his shot-making sometimes looked studied (his pull, for example, where he rolled his wrists over the ball with almost pedantic deliberation) was because he was wholly committed to the ground beneath his feet.

  His methods weren’t orthodox. It’s impossible for a lay viewer to know how a great player achieves his effects, but for what it’s worth I think the flourish in Dravid’s batting was a way of finding balance and delaying till the last possible second the decision to play. Watching him bat was like watching the movement of an old-fashioned clock: the pendulum working, gears and levers moving in perfect, elaborate accord to strike the hour when it’s due and not a second earlier.

  Style and idiosyncrasy in cricket are associated with attacking batsmanship. Dravid taught us that batsmen can be defensively sound in an original way. Someone should break his technique down into its component parts so it can be taught to others at a time when defensive techniques are atrophying. Tendulkar has been pinged more often than I can count, and Sehwag without a helmet wouldn’t last the length of a Test match. Dravid almost never got hit by the fast men. More than any batsman of this age, he can be compared with the greats of the pre-helmet epoch, because you know that he owed his runs to his technical genius, not to the insurance he wore on his head.

  Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in New Delhi. A version of this article was first published in the print version of Cricinfo Magazine in August 2006

  Of the 210 catches Dravid took in Test matches, more than half were off the bowling of Anil Kumble (55) and Harbhajan Singh (51).

  [ 2 ]

  The talent myth

  SURESH MENON

  It is fashionable in our times to claim that there is no such thing as talent and that all achievement is the result of hard work, or, in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, the “10,000-hour rule”. A slew of recent books – Matthew Syed’s Bounce, David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us, Gladwell’s Outliers among them – has been hammering this idea home. They are not designated self-help manuals but provide succour to the untalented. Talent is Overrated is the unambiguous title of a book by Geoff Colvin, where he speaks of “deliberate practice” as being more crucial than talent. The 10,000-hour rule refers to the amount of time someone has to work at his craft to reach the highest level.

  The modern reductive thinking was set off by the work of Anders Ericsson, a psychologist and researcher at Florida State University. Most popular books on the subject quote his work.

  The difference between the average joe and VS Naipaul is that the latter works harder and puts in a lot more hours. Ditto with Roger Federer or Tiger Woods or Eric Clapton. What a relief for the rest of us! We are not less talented at all – we merely can’t be bothered to spend all our time doing just the one thing. I mean, we have a life!

  There is a comfort in such smug thinking. It is at once an insult to a person’s ability and an inspiration for those who have neither the talent nor the inclination of the successful.

  Forget 10,000 hours. I can practice continuously for 10,000 days and still not be a Sachin Tendulkar. Or a Kevin Pietersen. For the essential flaw in the argument is that you need to have something to build on. And that something is talent. Genius, said Edison, is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. But without that 1%, you do not become a 99% genius. Just a dud. Talent without hard work withers early; hard work without talent gets you nowhere.

  The former England batsman and now author Ed Smith has a simple definition for “talent”. “It is what you can’t learn, hone or teach… a skill can be learned, talent can’t… talent is Garry Sobers, talent is Jimi Hendrix…”

  Not so long ago, the lack of talent was the theme of many studies of Pete Sampras. He was seen as boring, mechanical, untalented, and his 14 Grand Slam titles were seen as the result of hard work and self-denial. One of the greatest tennis players of all time was seen as untalented because he was not flamboyant – a common enough mistake for the unsophisticated fan to make, but scary when given respectability by columnists and pop psychologists.

  The thought was articulated by Sanjay Manjrekar in a piece. The former India player – coincidentally the man Rahul Dravid replaced – wrote, “That you don’t need to have great talent to become a sportsman is reinforced by Dravid’s achievements.”

  This is one of sport’s biggest misconceptions. It leads to the spurious conclusion that some top performers – Sampras, Gary Lineker, Sunil Gavaskar – are overachievers who made a little talent go a long way.

  This is the Fallacy of Incomplete Reasoning. The definition of talent is far too restrictive. This “talent” clearly does not take into account the stroke play Dravid was capable of – the on side was his, just as the off side was Sourav Ganguly’s in India’s great middle order of the time. Worse, it does not even consider mental toughness, the ability to read a game, the skill to change tack at will.

  Fifteen years at the top level without talent? Over 10,000 runs each in two forms of the game without talent? Three Test centuries at the age of 39 in England without talent? Then let us all drink what Dravid drinks.

  When Dravid went out to bat at Lord’s in his final Test there, the rest of us were not thinking, “Gosh, if only I had listened to my cricket coach, I would have been in his place!” At least some of us were marvelling at the mental toughness and the sheer grit of the man.

  The ability to work hard, the skill to swallow disappointments and return to the fray, the cussedness needed to keep at it and excel at it are all part of the concept of “talent”. Or have to be. By limiting the definition we fall for the seductive arguments of pop psychology, thus doing the talented an injustice. And we ignore the mystique that is the essential companion of the great performer.

  The rich are different from you and me, said the writer F Scott Fitzgerald. So are the talented. They are different from you and me. Dravid overcame more problems in the course of a single innings than many of us do in a whole year. You cannot do that without talent.

  Smith has said that talent, ironically, “has a nasty knack of protecting the talented from the urge to self-improve”. Dravid’s greatness lay in the fact that he worked on preserving his talent, on honing skills that would help the tal
ent become productive, and in the fact that from his teens he was already one of the most talented batsmen in the country. The first two would have been meaningless without the third.

  Cricket is the only sport where the term “old-fashioned” is a compliment. It is a quirk of the language, and perhaps of the game itself, that “old-fashioned” in cricket does not mean hidebound, inflexible or anything negative.

  Dravid was an old-fashioned cricketer who gave breath and body to the qualities that cricket aspires to, all the more startling in an era where selfishness is mistaken for professionalism and bad behaviour seen as the rage to perfection. Dravid was as tough and as professional as they come, yet with a moral centre that was uncompromising.

  He befriended both triumph and disaster in his first Test, making as many as 95 but missing out on a century. Perhaps out of that experience grew his essential character, the ability to treat these two impostors just the same, as recommended by Rudyard Kipling. 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.

  By any meaningful reckoning, traditional and experimental, he was India’s greatest match-winning batsman, with 24 away wins (Sachin Tendulkar has 20) where he averaged nearly 70. When imponderables are introduced into the equation, with such things as the ability to absorb pressure and match impact, he is the greatest series-defining batsman in the history of Test cricket, his count of eight series-defining performances greater than anybody else’s.

  In the trinity of Indian batsmanship – Sunil Gavaskar, Dravid and Tendulkar – each had a defined (and defining) role. They were the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer respectively. With the bowlers and the wickets at their most fresh, Gavaskar opened the batting to create the platform on which the middle order could build. At No. 3, Dravid’s role was to preserve a good start or make up for a bad one (on 66 occasions he went in to bat with the score in single digits). Tendulkar was the destroyer incarnate, reducing grown men to tears as they saw their best deliveries disappear past the boundaries on either side of the wicket.

  In his peak years, between 2001 and 2006, it was Dravid’s batting that secured victories in England, Australia, Pakistan and the West Indies. Yet even in that period Dravid’s self-deprecatory manner, unusual among Indian players, was remarkable. “People want me to get out quickly so they can watch Tendulkar bat,” he said on one occasion; later he often compared himself to Virender Sehwag, to his own disadvantage. Asked if he would make a triple-century someday, Dravid replied that you would need a ten-day Test match for that to happen.

  It was a tone familiar to those who knew him off the field, but seldom accessible to those who only knew him from watching his batting on television. There was a harmony. The same subtlety and knowledge of angles that marked his batting were evident in his dealings with people and his handling of situations that called for tact and delicacy.

  He was arguably India’s greatest catcher at slip, with 210 Test victims in his bag; it was all about anticipation and positioning rather than flamboyance and showmanship. That combination of intensity and relaxation, self-awareness and modesty, Test orthodoxy and limited-overs creativity is rare. It is called talent, and is as much a function of greatness as the stunning on-drive and the powerful square cut, both of which Dravid was master of.

  Suresh Menon is the editor of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack India

  Dravid’s win-loss record as a Test captain (eight wins, six losses) is third among Indians who led in at least 20 Tests, next only to MS Dhoni (17-10) and Sourav Ganguly (21-13).

  [ 3 ]

  The man who acquired greatness

  SAMBIT BAL

  The word “great” is subject to such careless and persistent abuse that you need to draw the lines afresh before you can use it properly. Once, when Virender Sehwag was carting the West Indian bowlers around in St Lucia in 2006, one of the more excitable members of the commentary team started to drop the word “great” quite liberally. It was certainly great to watch, but was it really one of the great innings? Was it even among Sehwag’s greatest?

  To take the discussion further, at 50 Tests, Sehwag’s numbers were superior to Sachin Tendulkar’s after the same number of games. Sehwag had more runs, more hundreds, and a better average. Yet Tendulkar was already a great player by his 50th Test. Because by then he had passed that simple yet all-important test that defines greatness: you could place him in any age, any conditions, against any bowlers, and in any match situation, and you could say that he would score plenty of runs and score them with authority. With Tendulkar, as with Brian Lara, or Viv Richards before them, greatness was established early. They had the gift, the genius.

  So did Mark Waugh. And VVS Laxman, who every once in a while can raise his game to a level where only genius can exist. But these two players fell short of greatness because their brilliance was fleeting, subject to moods. Their averages – in the forties – point to several lows and inconsistencies, and their careers are poignant reminders that uncommon gifts alone do not guarantee greatness.

  Conversely, Rahul Dravid piled up the most compelling evidence in favour of the argument that greatness can exist outside genius. Or perhaps at least that the commonly held definitions of what constitutes genius are a tad narrow.

  There are ways and ways to measure greatness. Some stamp their greatness by the way they bat, the way they conjure up strokes that are beyond the reach of most. Richards had greatness written in his mere walk to the middle, Tendulkar in his precocity, and Lara in his incandescence. Theirs was a greatness easy to notice because they were different from the rest. To watch them bat was to feel awe. To watch them dispatch good balls to the boundary was to feel blessed. They made you feel grateful for their genius.

  Dravid’s batsmanship was often taken for granted because it was so firmly rooted in time-worn traditions – leaving the good balls, not hitting in the air or on the up, and because it was so utterly comprehensible and lacking in mystique. But only those who have played the game at the highest level can fully appreciate the true meaning of Dravid’s craft.

  To see a good ball hit for four is a spectacle; surviving a great ball requires no less skill, though it rarely elicits awe. Watching a bouncer being hooked is among the most thrilling sights in cricket, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer. Few – Tendulkar and Lara included – have dealt with the short ball with greater poise than Dravid, whose eye never left the ball. He was hit a couple of times while trying to force the ball away, but rarely did you see him duck into a bouncer.

  Dravid’s other great strength was also intangible, and entirely invisible. In Adelaide in 2003, he batted India to victory by scoring 305 runs in the two innings, occupying the crease for 835 minutes. His batting was as much about technical virtuosity as it was about the mind. Test cricket, he often says, is such a fulfilling experience because it challenges the mind continuously for four or five days. Dravid belonged to that priceless breed of champions whose mental resolve is at its strongest when the situation is dire. His 270 in Rawalpindi in 2004 wasn’t his most flawless innings. He benefited from two umpiring decisions and a fielding lapse, but as was the case with the five hundreds that came before that innings, and a couple of nineties, it came when India needed it most.

  Dravid was India’s most dependable, most consistent and most valuable batsman. But he did not merely provide India’s dazzling batsmen with a cushion, he was the pivot around which the Indian batting revolved. Sachin Tendulkar was India’s batsman of the ‘90s; Rahul Dravid made the 2000s his own.

  The batting average is only one parameter to judge a batsman by, but whichever way you look at it, an average of over 50 in more than 150 Tests should be enough to grant a player his place in history. That Dravid has
a better average away from home should only add to the glow. However, the heart of his greatness doesn’t lie in the numbers but rather in the circumstances in which they have been compiled, and most of all, what they have meant for his team.

  It is Tendulkar’s misfortune that his best years as a batsman coincided with India’s most abject ones as a team. His brilliant hundreds in Australia, South Africa and England were all solos, made as his team crumbled around him. It didn’t help that the Indian national side was hostage to ad hoc amateurism at the time. Dravid’s peak, on the other hand, coincided with a period of wholesome progress for Indian cricket, and in many ways Dravid was the singular embodiment of this progress. He was the model professional, wholehearted team man, progressive leader, and of course, lynchpin of Indian batting.

  The manner of playing is a fair pointer, and so are statistics, but to many the essence of a cricketer’s greatness lies in what his performances have meant to the team. Dravid’s figures were outstanding: he averaged more than 53 abroad, 21 of his 36 hundreds came away from home, and between 2001 and 2006, when India won 26 out of 66 Tests, he averaged more than 60. But to his team, Dravid meant much more than the numbers.

  He saved them from defeats in South Africa, West Indies and England, and set up wins in Sri Lanka, England and Australia. Barring Multan in 2004, he played a hand, often the critical one, in every Indian Test win abroad in his time. Even on the tour of Australia in 2008, when he was in the middle of one of the roughest phases of his career, he played a vital hand in setting up what has been India’s only Test win in Perth. Sourav Ganguly brought the charge, Tendulkar stirred the imagination, but without fanfare Dravid became the backbone of Indian cricket