It is a measure of the man that he took it all in his stride. Indeed, he admits that some of it was justified. “I would be the first to admit that I’m not a complete player,” he said. “You have to keep improving, keep raising the bar each time you go out to bat.” At the age of 31, he has taken his own advice and is a cricketer reborn.
Sachin Tendulkar had raised the bar impossibly high, and Indian supporters had been seduced to such an extent that their other batsmen, gifted though they were, became an afterthought, fair game for the critics. Dravid’s gentle demeanour made him an easier target than most, but apart from one angry flourish of the bat during the second Test against Australia at Eden Gardens in 2001, when he and VVS Laxman shared a stand of 376 on the way to a memorable victory, he refused to display any signs of frustration, no matter what he may have felt inside. Looking back, he insists that he didn’t mind some of the harsh words. “I’ve always tried to look at the criticism objectively, instead of brushing it off as nonsense,” he says. “Sometimes, it lets you know which areas of your game you need to work at.”
The snail is history anyway, washed away by three years of wonderfully consistent batting, replete with cultured strokes and strength of will. The bar remains sky-high, but it’s not just Tendulkar holding it aloft.
What has changed? “I haven’t really altered my game much in terms of preparation or technique, but I am far fitter than I was then,” he says. “And I also have the confidence that comes from scoring runs.”
The rapid strides can be attributed to two things, self-belief and being part of a team that started to edge slowly towards greatness on the tours of Australia and Pakistan. “I’ve grown as a batsman and as a person,” he says. And he relishes playing for this India team: “There are people around you with the same ideas, and we all feel we are contributing towards something special. And when you feel that things are going in the right direction, I think there’s a tendency for individuals to reach above themselves and do extraordinary things.”
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Dravid has accomplished his fair share, with his unflinching desire to succeed and solidity at the crease providing the bedrock of India’s greatest modern-day triumphs — 180 at Eden Gardens, where his classy supporting act supplemented Laxman’s 281, the 148 on a treacherous pitch at Headingley (2002), the 305 runs (233 and 72 not out) he made while batting for 835 minutes at Adelaide (2003), and the 270 at Rawalpindi in April, which gave India a first series triumph in Pakistan.
India’s fickle cricketing public is coming around to the view that Dravid might have — whisper it — replaced Tendulkar as the team’s premier batsman. And considering that Tendulkar, along with Brian Lara, has long been considered the best there is, there’s a fair case for Dravid being given pride of place in the modern-day batting pantheon. But when you suggest that to him, he blushes. “Sachin and Lara are in a different league,” he says. “
They’re the best because they’ve been doing it for a long period. I’d pay to go and watch them bat.”
According to Dravid, there are three others deserving of special mention. “You can’t have any list without Matthew Hayden and Ricky Ponting,” he says. “The way Hayden has batted in the last three years, and the rate at which he scores his runs, is simply amazing. And there’s Jacques Kallis, who has had a phenomenal run recently. It surprises me that so few people talk about him.”
Part of the reason could be Kallis’s relative lack of success in England and Australia, two tours that are still considered benchmarks for batting greatness. Dravid went to Australia last November with his critics pointing out that his previous excursion there had realised just 93 runs in six innings. After 619 runs in four Tests, those snipers were silenced.
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Tendulkar, like the banyan trees that dot many parts of India’s landscape, has cast a giant shadow during his 15 years with the national team, but Dravid, who made his debut at Lord’s in 1996, says his very presence in the side has been of enormous benefit to newcomers. “It’s out of the ordinary just to watch him bat,” he says.
Two years ago, I asked him how it felt to come in to bat before Tendulkar, knowing that some in the crowd might be willing him to fail just so that they could feast their eyes on a man who is more demigod than batsman. “It’s not easy,” he said. “The crowd are there to watch him, and half the time I’m waiting to watch him too.” It’s a different ball game now. Since June 2002, when India embarked on their tour of England, Dravid has averaged 81.61 from 18 Tests, better than Ponting (76.18), Hayden (69.05) and Lara (72.06), and, tellingly, 25 points more than Tendulkar. He has made seven centuries and six 50s in that period, second only to Ponting, who has 10 three-figure knocks. And for somebody who supposedly couldn’t hack it in the one-day arena, his figures (since the NatWest Series in June 2002) are none too shabby — 2,059 runs from 66 matches at an average of 43.80.
Australia have always been the litmus test for this Indian side, and that rivalry, which Steve Waugh reckoned might one day supersede the Ashes, will be renewed in October when Ponting and his men tour India for a four-Test series. Dravid is one of those to attribute the series win in Pakistan to the confidence gained from the team’s performances in Australia. “When you come so close to beating the best team in the world, it gives you enormous self-belief,” he says.
As for England, this week’s opposition in the NatWest Challenge, he has encouraging words: “They’re a far more confident side than when we last played them, no doubt because they’ve won so many games on the bounce.” But there’s also a cautionary note. “There is no secret to success against Australia. You have to go out there and make a pile of runs to have any chance against them. But for the Test we lost in Melbourne, we made more than 400 in every match we played. If you can’t do that, they’ll walk all over you.”
Dravid has never been one for the scandal sheets, or self-aggrandisement. Even his marriage last year was a relatively quiet affair, given his pin-up status in middle India. And he appreciates the fact that his wife, a doctor who works in Bangalore, is no great cricket fan herself. “She watches the game, but isn’t really too fanatical about it,” he says. “I prefer it that way. I’d rather not come home and spend all my time talking about the game.”
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But despite his best efforts to convince you that he’s just an Ordinary Joe, cricket lovers worldwide have cottoned on to the fact that somebody with a Test average of 58.09 — and 49 scores over 50, including 17 hundreds, in 78 matches — is anything but that. They still call him The Wall out of admiration in these parts, but now may be time to prefix that with Great.