Keep the faith

How can one even begin to describe what Rahul Dravid means to India?

Life stops in India when cricket begins. The rhythm of ordinary life gets a burst of momentum from the happenings on the cricket field; the narrative of play shapes the ebbs and flows of our emotions; the sounds that emanate from inside a living room with a TV express the gamut of human emotion: sighs of delight, moans of disappointment, curses, exclamations, war-cries.

The men who play the game, thus, are not merely sportsmen playing a sport; they're characters in a very intense, internalised private drama - or dramas, millions of them. Rahul Dravid, private man, is dissected, analysed, worshipped, rebuked, abhorred, adored by millions. The dualities are striking; on one hand, his face adorns thousands of walls across the country, his presence can do wonders for a brand. On the other, he is reviled for his slow batting, for getting bogged down, for staying at the crease while He (Sachin, of course) waits, padded up in the pavilion. One day, he is an epitome of reliability, The Wall who stands firm in adversity; the next, he's a brittle player who cannot take pressure, who does not deliver when India most need him too.

Durban and Durban
This schizophrenic love-hate relationship began well: Dravid kicked off his Test career with scores of 95 and 84, but first showed glimpses of greatness in his seventh Test, against South Africa. On a Durban track of unusual potency, Allan Donald and Shaun Pollock ran through the Indians; 100 all out in the first innings, they were 15 for four in the second, with Tendulkar the last man out. Dravid went in, and the resultant innings of 27*, out of a total of 66 all out, brought out the quintessential Dravid; gutsy, unflappable, resolute and technically immaculate.

Forty seven days later, he walked out in the final of the Standard Bank triangular, also at Durban, with India needing 279 to win; he blazed his way to 84 off 94 balls, treating Donald with special disdain. Miles removed from the dour batsman he was beginning to get a reputation of being, this innings showed Another Side of Rahul Dravid: strokeful, destructive, stylish, elegant and, again, technically immaculate.

Virtue and Virtuosity
Rahul Dravid is not always right, but he's always correct. His childhood coach in Bangalore, the formidable Keki Tarapore, once spoke of how, when Dravid first showed up at his nets as an 11-year-old, he was keen to learn the correct way of playing every shot; his priority was not to hit the ball around as a kid that age would want to do, but to learn technique, to internalise the textbook.

That correctness - doing things 'the right way' - has remained with him; not just in his cricket, but in his character as well. In an episode of MTV Bakra a few months ago, an attractive teenage girl made a pass at him. Genuinely horrified, he scolded her and told her to concentrate on her studies. This virtue shines through in his batting as well; it is rare to see Dravid get out playing a rash shot - every ball is played on its merit.

It has been postulated that his greatest strength can also become a weakness sometimes; in times of strife, men tend to fall back on what gives them strength from within; with Dravid, it's his correctness, his flawless defensive technique. And when the pressure piles up, the theory goes, his reflexive reaction is to fall back on this. This bogs him down: he becomes a slave to his technique, not its master; once an end in itself, it now fails to become the means to an end.

While there may well be some truth to this (he does get bogged down often enough - witness his 3 off 61 against England in the Bangalore Test), it must be argued that every player's strength can occasionally be a double-edged sword; off-side maestro Sourav Ganguly gets out most often with a miscued cut or off-drive, strokeplayer supremo Tendulkar is frequently dismissed playing an aggressive stroke. Too often, Dravid has used his technique to facilitate some spectacular, and safe, strokeplay - his virtue the bedrock of his virtuosity.

Mind it
Sport is played as much in the mind as on the ground. Rahul Dravid has been playing it all his life; if there is one word that can be used to encapsulate him as a player, it is: Intensity. Dravid has never been a man to take things lightly. From that first net-session with Tarapore, he has been Intense (almost obsessive) about his cricket. He's never shirked from the hard work required to get to the top, and having got there, never shirked from the responsibilities thrust upon him, from the often-unreal expectations people have had of him.

How then, one wonders, does he handle those expectations, the pressure whose intensity rivals his own? Intensity is a bitch of pedigree, but with much unwanted litter; one being a tendency to brood over criticism. Does Dravid show signs of this? The way he thrust his bat towards the commentator's box when he reached his hundred in Kolkata indicates that all the press-criticism, the questions raised about his ability, did matter to him. (How can it not? Despite the millions who worship him, he is human, like us.) Does he, then, carry that baggage out with him on the crease? When things get rough out in the middle, is he able to focus completely on the situation at hand (with his legendary powers of concentration), or is he also churning around, in his subconscious, all those doubts that have ever been raised about his inability to handle just such a situation?

Steam escaping from whistle
One view being propagated a lot these days is that Rahul Dravid simply can't take the heat. At first, the statistics would seem to support that assertion: his average in losing Test matches is a mere 28.2; in Tests India has lost batting fourth, his contribution in the last innings has been a paltry 18.8. His critics say that he has never won, or even saved, any matches for India.

Easily debunked. No batsman excels in the matches his team has lost: that is one reason his team loses, after all. Sachin Tendulkar averages 27.4 in Tests India has lost, and 21.69 in the last innings of fourth innings losses. And as for saving and winning matches, while Dravid may not have won too many matches in earlier years (How many batsmen have?), in 2001, he has been exemplary. His brilliant knock of 180 in Kolkata against Australia was a vital cog in India's amazing win, and he also won India the Kandy Test against Sri Lanka. He saved India the Port Elizabeth Test against South Africa, a day after l'affaire Denness, with the whole team under immense stress.

After the Don
The role Dravid plays in the Indian team, and has played for most of his career, is that of the anchor at No. 3, the gatherer to Sachin Tendulkar's hunter at No. 4. Much as he is reviled for his dreary batting, he has been an incredible success at this position. Statistics would, in fact, indicate that he is not just the Best No. 3 batsman in the world today, he's one of the best in the history of the game.

Gulp, you go, understandably - what was that again? Consider this: Dravid's batting average at No. 3 is 55.50. Among batsmen who have played 50 Test innings or more, and at least half at that position (to qualify as a regular No. 3 batsman), only Don Bradman ranks ahead of him. For those who might mock that the bulk of these runs come at home and against weak opposition, here's his batting average at No. 3 overseas: 57.46. (At all positions abroad, it's a trifle lower, at 53.2.) Sachin Tendulkar averages 54.07 overseas, Sunil Gavaskar was 52.11.

Free your mind, and the best will follow
Nevertheless, Dravid's demotion down the order actually seems to have helped him in 2001; after he was dropped to No. 4 in the one-dayers, he has averaged almost 44. This was equally true in Tests; after being relegated to No. 6 for the Kolkata Test against the Aussies, he played with invigorating freedom, while losing none of his solidity. Much of the pressure of having to anchor the innings had gone; his average at that far less stressful position is a mindboggling 81.4.

Maybe it didn't have anything to do with going down the order; perhaps it was just a coming of age. It's commonly acknowledged that batsmen reach their peaks between the ages of 28 to 35; Dravid has just turned 29. His best years lie ahead of him; he can easily make sure that if a second part to this article is written eight years from now, there is only one story the statistics will tell, and the dualities will disappear, to reveal a batsman that Rahul Dravid has always had the talent to become: one of the all-time greats.