Hail the new master

There's more to Rahul Dravid than just cricket © AFP Enlarge

It's time to stop fudging the obvious with phraseology. Rahul Dravid is not merely India's most dependable or most consistent or most valuable batsman. He is all of these. But the time has come to recognise that on the basis of his performances in the last three years he is, quite simply, India's best batsman. He is not merely the fortress providing India's dazzling batsmen with a cushion; he has become the pivot around which the Indian batting revolves. Sachin Tendulkar was India's batsman of the '90s; Rahul Dravid has made this decade his very own.

Being the kind of man that he is, Dravid would blush and simply look away if you were to suggest this to him, not because he is oblivious to his enormous skills or his value to the side. It's because, like Tendulkar, he is grounded in humility and modesty. Add to that his powers of articulation and concerns for broader society, and he is the perfect turn-of-the-millennium hero. Cricketers like Tendulkar and Brian Lara were destined for greatness, while Dravid has scripted his own destiny.

Writing in Wisden Asia Cricket a couple of months ago, Sanjay Manjrekar - a batsman in whose mould Dravid is cast - hailed Dravid as the fourth Indian batting great after Gavaskar, Viswanath and Tendulkar. Interestingly, he also implied that Dravid's rise had belied his own initial impressions, because while Dravid always looked a good batsman, there was little that suggested greatness.

For measuring greatness, there are ways and ways. Some stamp their greatness by the way they bat, the way they conjure up strokes that are beyond the realms of most. Viv Richards had greatness written in his mere walk to the middle, Tendulkar in his precocity, and Lara in his incorrigible 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.

Yet greatness can easily reside outside genius even if it takes time to register. Dravid's batsmanship has often been taken for granted because it is so firmly rooted in orthodoxy, because it is so utterly comprehensible and so utterly 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, but it rarely elicits a sense of wonderment. It is easy to be agog over a batsman responding to a sharp short ball with an explosive hook, but we often miss the artfulness and skill involved in leaving a bouncer. Few, Tendulkar and Lara included, deal with the short ball with greater poise and equanimity than Dravid, whose eye never leaves the ball. Dravid has been hit a couple of times while trying to force the ball away, but rarely would you see him ducking in to a bouncer.

Dravid's other great strength is also intangible, and entirely invisible. At Adelaide last December, he batted India to victory by scoring 305 runs in the two innings, occupying the crease for 835 minutes. After the match, as he sat back in the dressing-room soaking in the taste of success, along with elation, he felt mentally spent. Dravid's batting is as much about technical purity as it is about the mind. Test cricket, he often says, is such a fulfilling experience because it challenges the mind continuously for four to five days. Dravid belongs to that priceless breed of champions whose mental resolve is at its strongest when the situation is the direst. His innings at Rawalpindi wasn't his most flawless or the prettiest. He benefited from two umpiring decisions and a fielding lapse, but as is the case with his last five hundreds and a couple of nineties, it came when India needed it the most.

Which brings us to the final, and most defining, aspect of Dravid's greatness. The manner of playing and statistics are fair pointers, but to many, the heart of a cricketer's greatness lies in what his performances have meant to the team. Statistically, Dravid's figures are outstanding. He averages more than 60 abroad, 11 of his 17 hundreds have come away from home, and since 2000 he has averaged more than 60 with ten hundreds. But to his team, Dravid has meant much more. He has answered nearly every call of crisis, he has saved them from defeats in South Africa, West Indies and England, and set up wins in Sri Lanka, England and Australia. Barring Multan, he has played a hand, often the critical one, in every Indian Test win abroad. His failure in both innings at Lahore was a further pointer to his worth. As at Melbourne in the Boxing Day Test, his dismissals heralded collapses.

Tendulkar will perhaps end his career with a hundred hundreds. But as Indian cricket stands on the precipice of its own golden age, it must be remembered that Rahul Dravid has made the most difference.

Sambit Bal is the editor of Wisden Asia Cricket magazine and of Wisden Cricinfo in India.