On Thursday afternoon, a foreboding email from the BCCI invited the media to Bangalore for a special announcement. Dravid will quit international cricket on Friday morning in a room at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, in front of TV cameras falling over one another for sound bytes and cricket writers from different pockets of the country raising their hands to ask what lies ahead.
There will be no victory lap before screaming fans, as Sourav Ganguly experienced in Nagpur in 2008, and no corridor of teammates lining the dressing room exit, like at Anil Kumble’s send-off at the Ferozeshah Kotla 39 months ago. Dravid’s chosen moment, much like his batting and his glorious 16-year career, will be without frills; unassuming yet effective.
It would normally be difficult to say anything about a batsman with 13,265 runs in 163 Test matches that would either add to his aura or take anything away from it. But in Dravid’s case, a lot still needs to be discovered by a country that praises him but doesn’t fully understand what he stands for.
Dravid is Jammie to his friends and The Wall to his followers: a sobriquet, born from good intentions, that could not have been more inappropriate. While the nickname is meant to be a celebration of his solidity, it has implicit references that do him a great disservice.
A wall is passive, and usually without character. It is an obstacle that wears down attackers but is unable to mount a retaliation of its own. On innumerable occasions (in Adelaide, Leeds, Hamilton and Jamaica, for example) Dravid fashioned victories when all was lost: not by dourly refusing to give in, but by charging at the opposition army, slaying warriors in his path, and hoisting his flag in the enemy citadel. There may have been a few occasions when he stood rigidly, as does any batsman over a long career. He may come across as reticent, sometimes even demure. But The Wall doesn’t even begin to describe him, so how can it sum him up?
Dravid’s disadvantage in the perception game largely comes from two factors. First, his batting style, bordering on an obsession with technical perfection, did not easily inspire adjectives other than ‘gritty’ or ‘firm’.
If there are two different ways of getting a job done, Dravid chose to rely on geometric precision to a point where every minute detail had been accounted for, as opposed to a gung-ho arrogance where you laugh in the face of adversity. It was a style that was easy to admire but not so easy to celebrate.
Second, for most of his early career, he was upstaged by a more attractive team mate almost every time he notched up a score of note: starting from his debut at Lord’s when his 95 was trumped by Ganguly’s 131, to the 145 at the World Cup in Taunton where Ganguly got 183, to the 180 at Eden Gardens when Laxman stuck his magnum opus 281, to a match-winning 148 at Headingly where Sachin Tendulkar struck 193 to go past Don Bradman’s 29 Test centuries.
By the time he broke the shackles, routinely outshining his colleagues in the most adverse of circumstances, Dravid had been typecast. Except in the heat of the moment, when fans were relieved that he had come through once again, he was not regarded in the same league as his flamboyant contemporaries, Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting. He was too prim and proper to give your heart to. Stats served him well but nostalgia somehow didn’t.
Over the last year, Dravid had been playfully candid about being viewed in a manner that perhaps did not do him justice. The moment he landed in England last summer, he joked about his batting style being “boring”, and brought it up again during the Bradman Oration in Canberra at the end of the year. A player with a profound sense of history, it seemed that he was actively contemplating his own place in history, and accepting that he had no option but to embrace whatever tag had been attached.
What is universally recognised is that he is India’s finest No 3 batsman ever, and one of the greatest to have stepped on a cricket field. He will forever be remembered as a leader of the Indian team’s post-80s renaissance, and as the most pedigreed batsman of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
We will no longer see Rahul Dravid, dressed impeccably in white flannels, walking out at the fall of the first wicket, his presence alone acting as a balm; marking his guard, wincing as the bowler runs in, and shaking his head at every false stroke. We won’t see his perfect cover drive, his whipping blade as the ball darts through the on-side; and above all, innings made from blood and sweat that may not have seemed remarkable while they were being created but were masterpieces once he was done.
Today he leaves a Rahul Dravid-sized hole in world cricket. One that won’t be filled, no matter how much brick and mortar you chuck into it.