The Great Wall of Cricket

THEN HE CRIED. BUT WHAT CHANCE DID HE, RAHUL DRAVID, winner of a World Cup at long last during the final hour of his three-decade-long career with the Indian team, be it as player or coach, really have?

Usually so stoic, Dravid’s long-time nickname is literally an inanimate object made of brick and cement. The Wall is mostly to describe his immaculate defence and overall immovability, but also perfectly applicable to his total control over his emotions. His com­posure was duly in check when he entered the Kensington Oval play area in Barbados to meet a stream of hands held out by the suffering South Africans and ecstatic Indians, Dravid paying total heed to that line from Kipling’s ‘If’, meeting with triumph and disaster and treating those impostors just the same with a gentle nod of the head here and a pat on the back there.

Until, further down this line of players in green and blue, Dravid’s path crossed Virat Kohli’s and the two former captains of India embraced, with the Man of the Match from the 2024 T20 World Cup final weeping copiously on his coach’s shoulder. The Wall began to crack.

When they split and Dravid broke away from the player trail, he wiped his eyes repeatedly. Though these were happy tears, long-time followers of Indian cricket couldn’t but help remember the last time this great man cried publicly on a cricket ground, for that had occurred on a Caribbean island too, some 17 years ago. Just south of where he now stood in Bridgetown, Barbados, possibly the happiest he has ever been professionally, Dravid had hit rock bottom in Port of Spain, Trinidad, after India couldn’t even progress out of the group stage of the 2007 ODI World Cup under his leadership.

Back home in India, effigies of India’s stars were torched, their houses vandalised, but the immediate aftermath entailed getting rid of the ageing heavyweights—Dravid, Sourav Ganguly, and Sachin Tendulkar—for the upcoming inaugural edition of the T20 World Cup in South Africa later that same year, with the selectors keen on testing out the young and hungry in a largely unknown format. India then went on to not only win that World Cup in a thriller of a final against Pakistan but they had also discovered a natural-born leader in MS Dhoni and a precocious talent in a 20-year-old kid called Rohit Sharma, playing in his very first T20 tournament and finishing as the second-highest scorer for India in the summit clash of Johannesburg.

Little would Dravid have guessed back in Port of Spain that he would never play a World Cup again, just when the global events were spreading across formats. When the next 50-over quadrennial was rolled out across the subcontinent in 2011, Dravid watched from afar at Virat Kohli, who would go on to occupy his long-time No 3 batting position. Kohli soaked up the incredulous pressure that was the early dismissals of Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag in the home final at the Wankhede. Then he produced a quality rearguard innings that only hasn’t received the credit it deserves due to the twin 90s constructed by Dhoni and Gautam Gambhir. Anyway, thus ended an all-time great career in white-ball cricket—Dravid has over 10,000 ODI runs—in a whim­per, with no proper silverware to show for his once-in-a-generation kind of brilliance.

Add to that his near-misses at securing India a world title as coach—the 2022 T20 World Cup (semi-final defeat), 2023 World Test Championship (defeat in the final), and 2023 ODI World Cup (defeat in the final)—Dravid must have, in his darker moments, felt that these big ICC trophies are just not meant to be in his career. Especially so after South Africa needed just 30 runs from 30 balls on his last day as India coach, his ploys on the very verge of sending his cricket-loving nation into yet another spell of mourn­ing. Axar Patel had just been hit for 24 runs in an over. But against all odds, two Jasprit Bumrah overs, one by Arshdeep Singh, and another by Hardik Pandya saw just 14 runs scored off 24 balls, before Pandya comfortably defended the 16 runs required by the opposition and a bunch of nearly theres, led by a coach who had never been there, were there.

If Kohli had made him weep earlier, he also brought the other extreme emotion, joy of the unadulterated kind, to Dravid’s face. Shortly after the players had had their fun with the trophy, it was Kohli who presented it to the leader of the backroom staff. So, Dravid immediately hoisted his first World Cup above his cap, shut his eyes tight and let out a long and primal scream, wonder­fully out of character. He promptly lost his voice thereafter, and his words as well. Surrounded by a clutch of reporters in the out­field, a hoarse Dravid whispered: “I really have felt short of words over the last few hours. I just could not be more proud of this team, the way we had to fight difficult situations.” Then he took a pause and added: “You know, as a player, I was not lucky enough to win a trophy, but I tried my best whenever I played and it happens.”

Those words once again brought to mind the sad tears in Port of Spain and the happy tears of Bridgetown, spread an island and 17 years apart, along with the redemptive arc he had achieved along the way. But Dravid was having none of it. “I am not one of those guys who think about redemption and those kinds of things. There are a lot of other players I know who have not been able to win a trophy,” he said. “I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to coach, and I was lucky that this bunch of boys made it possible for me to be able to win a [World Cup] trophy and celebrate.”

And just like that, he had faded into the background once again, happy to leave the fame and the plaudits to the men that matter most to him, his squad. But will he, winner of his first World Cup at 51, be able to move on from this achievement, he was asked, and Dravid smiled. “I will be able to because next week I will be unemployed again. So, any offers?”

SELF-DEPRECATION IS A large part of Dravid’s character, and charm. Ahead of the 50-over World Cup at home last year, possibly his greatest assignment as coach (the ODI quadrennial still remains the biggest prize in the sport, despite T20 cricket’s resounding popularity overall and Test cricket finally falling into a two-year championship cycle), he employed his cheeky humour like a weapon in the media, mostly to deflect from pertinently difficult questions on some of his choices but often also to put on display how different in style his regime was from that of his very successful predecessor, Ravi Shastri. Shastri, a born alpha and leader of men, had an easy-to-understand mantra: his way or the highway. It was obvious that Dravid’s nature would beg for a different approach and ideology.

To illustrate, at one point in Chennai, ahead of India’s campaign opener, he was asked how similar or different it was to coach India at an ODI World Cup after already having the experience of captaining at one. He thought long and hard, then chuckled with what his mind had thrown up as an answer. “I don’t know, yaar. It’s been a long time since I was a player that I almost forget that I was actually a cricket player at one stage, to be honest with you. I’ve moved on from that, I don’t even think of myself as a player anymore.” The room laughed and Dravid shrugged, going on to explain how his job was to “support the vision of the captain” and come up with a “conducive environ­ment for the players to thrive in” because he, as coach, “won’t be scoring a single run or taking a single wicket at this World Cup.” With such statements, shying away from the value of his role and praise in general, being repeated right through the campaign, Dravid painted a picture of that wise parent who offered help if needed but otherwise let the children be. And it was easy to see how he united a divided dressing room. Shastri’s way undoubt­edly had its gains, but the fact that it didn’t result in a major global trophy either left administrators and fans frustrated. Both sets of shareholders demanded wholesale changes to the team’s core after India’s group stage loss in the 2021 T20 World Cup. Too many key players in their 30s, the critics said. Shastri stepped down as coach, as did Kohli as captain, making way for Dravid and Rohit respectively, who were expected to chop, cull and overhaul.

Dravid, however, is a romantic; a believer in second chances and a third one, if need be. He changed the Indian team by not changing it much at all. The old greats stayed but were given better defined roles even as Dravid reintroduced the dying concept of an extra all-rounder so he could lengthen his bowl­ing line-up at all times. He was also there for his boys, the man who offered reasons when they were dropped, who followed up with them when they weren’t a regular part of the dressing room. The facet of his man-management skills that stood out the most was his ability to back talents in the face of severe public outrage and criticism. It was his unwavering belief in Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul and Mohammed Shami that saw them save and win games for India, often single-handedly, as the side stormed into the World Cup final back in November, unbeaten in 10 straight games until Ahmedabad. Then, when they lost, it was Dravid and not Rohit who attended the funereal press conference. Such, again, is his nature. He praised Rohit as an exceptional leader, for batting fear­lessly too, and reminded a glum room that the sun would indeed rise the following day. A few sunrises on, sometime in November itself, Rohit made the phone call to an unsure coach, pleading with him to continue his tenure until the T20 World Cup in 2024.

There must have been a sense of déjà vu, if not nerves, when India reached this final in Barbados as well without losing a match. The host broadcasters in India, Star Sports, ran a build-up campaign, which had the tagline: ‘Do It For Dravid’. The man himself was most unimpressed, requesting the channel to take it down with this explanation: “It’s totally against who I am as a person. It’s totally against my values. I don’t really believe in this: do it for somebody. I love that quote about somebody asking someone, ‘Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?’ And he says, ‘Because it’s there.’ Why do we want to win the World Cup? Because it’s there! It’s not for anyone, it’s not for anybody; it’s just there to win.”

The British mountaineer George Mallory, who uttered those words before dying on his third expedition to Everest in 1924 (a good three decades before it was certainly scaled in 1953), has remained one of the modern world’s great unsolved mysteries, with even forensic evidence (Mallory’s body was discovered in 1999) unable to settle the debate on whether he summited or not. A day after he invoked Mallory’s phrase, incidentally on the fateful expedition’s 100th anniversary, there were no debates on Dravid’s attempt to reach the roof of the world. He had finally conquered his own personal Everest.

About The Author

Aditya Iyer

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