Rahul
Dravid – A Cricketing Statesman
This
piece is dedicated to Rahul Dravid -- the `Great Wall Of Indian Cricket`.
This was the partnership that changed the face of Indian cricket, and mind you, for a nation obsessed with Tendulkar and his cricketing exploits, mostly batting, his contribution in this match was with the ball in the second innings. This partnership created a never-before-like self belief in Indian cricket, and it moved from strength to strength from thereon. While VVS Laxman’s innings of 281 is a top-of-the-mind recall, it is not easily remembered that without Dravid’s 180, the match and the series would have been lost, leading to a humiliating loss of face at home.
Rahul Dravid has been like the quintessential younger sibling who has to fight to retain his eminence pitted against a dynamic elder one. If Tendulkar is the Big Brother of Indian cricket, Dravid has been the anchor, the second best, whose quiet demenaour, unassuming behavior and unglamorous style of play is not a viewer’s delight and offers little news value off the field. In a world of fast paced cricket defined by instant gratification – or instant dissatisfaction, depending on whether you end up on the winning or losing side – defined by the T 20 culture, Dravid is the `boring` connoisseur of test match cricket -- grafting, plodding, structuring, and eventually delivering.
If Sehwag is the murderer of bowling attacks, Tendulkar the master of contexts, and Laxman the artist using a bat instead of a brush, Dravid is the stuff text books are made of. Just as you cannot breach through text books without painfully simmering through them in detail, how much ever you dislike them, you cannot breach through Dravid’s defence unless he decides to play slightly away from the body, just to show he too can be susceptible at times to the temptation of flirting with danger. They call him the `Wall`, but bowlers will tell you when Dravid is in his zone, he actually comes across as a standing institution, on which you can at best create a few cracks, but not break through it. He is what defines test match batting – here we are of course discounting Sehwag’s views on the matter. In that sense, Dravid is the real successor of Sunil Gavaskar, who brought pride and elegance to defensive strokeplay.
The Bradman Coronation speech delivered by Dravid this week -- the first non-Aussie to do so -- in Canberra was just like his batting – astute, structured, straight, unapologetic, with no `ifs` about anything. In his speech (You can read the transcript of his speech on http://www.cricketcountry.com/cricket-articles/Rahul-Dravid-s-Sir-Don-Bradman-Oration-full-transcript/9069), he came across not as a cricketer, but as a cricketing statesman. His views on the overall state of cricket gives an insight into the thinker in him. It shows his brain does not just record and process information needed to play a winning innings for his country, but it also cogitates upon the game in the larger interest and greater context of cricket as a sport. It is not rare to have distinguished sportspeople becoming `experts` about the game once they retire, but it is indeed refreshing to see someone like Dravid deliver a statesmanlike speech and air his views without fear in the prime of his form, if not in the prime of his career.
In his speech, the holistic analysis of the state of world cricket, besides highlighting the Indian character of life and living, in a manner only a true Indian can, is a classical example of rising above one’s limited context, yet remaining rooted to from where he has emerged. Statesmen carry in their mental frame a worldview and not just a view of their immediate surroundings, and Dravid did just that. While playing for India, he has an intellectual paradigm about the overall state of the game built into the central processing unit of his brain.
Rahul Dravid, on that day at Canberra, did not just stand up for himself, but stood up for his team, his country and the sport which has made him what he is – and mind you, he’s not finished as yet from constructing an even greater colossus. Thus, he was at once Indian, at once global, at once a visionary, and at once an ambassador of a game which is torn between its various formats, financial pulls and pressures.
The Bradman Coronation was a perfect backdrop to yet another potentially explosive India-Australia test series, starting on Boxing Day. Will the statesman-batsman Rahul Sharad Dravid, on perhaps his last tour to Australia, manage to give the Aussies the knockout punch this time? We will wait and watch.
Brilliant Stuff. You are really evolving as a writer.Keep it up.
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