Opinion He’s a good man and batted like a good man

It was but a feather that prevented him from getting a century on debut at Lords. He would have liked it,for he has a sense of history about him. He would have wanted to be on that honours board. Fifteen years later,he inscribed his name there with a Dravid special. They love him there like he is one of their own and,indeed,England has been a recurring motif in his life. The 1999 World Cup,the majesty of 2002 when he out-batted the world and produced one of his finest innings at Leeds,winning a series as captain in 2007,and then those three centuries last year that reminded us once again what test cricket was all about.

At Lords he remained not out from number three,at Trent Bridge he opened the batting and was ninth out and at the Oval,at the age of 38,he had but ten minutes between deliveries as he batted through the innings for six and a half hours and returned to open the batting. A standing ovation had just died down before another took its place. I stood too,not for the first time.

He loved to explore England,by foot,in buses and in trains,always asking about the latest musical and offering extended reviews of those he had seen. One such exploration took him to Scotland,from where he returned humbler,if that was possible. He was getting paid to play,he said,but everyone else was paying to play; taking unpaid leave,shutting down shops,all for the sheer joy of playing. He learnt,he said,how much you can take for granted as an international star. I can see why he will continue to be a giver,why his doors will be open for other cricketers. And I hope they learn from him never to say no.

There were two things Dravid didn’t really love in cricket: opening the batting and keeping wicket. He was asked to do both at various times and I asked him if he ever contemplated saying no. He didn’t enjoy it,he said,but took it as a challenge to see how good he could be. This acceptance of a challenge is what has defined his cricket and made him one of the finest team players there has been. He said a challenge allowed him to understand himself better — it gave him a reason to play sport. If he shied away,he would never know how good he could be. He kept wickets in about 70 one-day internationals,never very convincingly,but he allowed himself to look bad for the team to look good. It was always the team for him and in the little piece he wrote for the book that my wife Anita and I did,he quoted Kipling: “for the strength of the wolf is the pack and the strength of the pack is the wolf”. It was nice to see a cricketer quoting from literature!

He often likens the team to a pot. Some put in and some take out. The more that put in,the fuller it gets and those were the players he enjoyed playing with the most,those that put into the pot. He was one of the leading contributors and there was never an effort at gaining sympathy or media attention for it. He gave quietly. He was one of the reasons why India recovered so quickly from the match-fixing issue towards the turn of the century. India had some outstanding men of integrity at the time in Tendulkar,Dravid,Kumble,Ganguly,Laxman and Srinath. It was a good group to belong to.

The turn of the century was also the coming of age of Dravid as an international cricketer. He had proved people wrong about his ability to play one-day cricket at the World Cup but then went to Australia convinced he needed to do well to gain respect. It is a word he will often use in conversation (“the respect in your dressing room and that of your opponents is what matters”) but in pursuit of it he tried too hard,cocooning himself into a mass of nervous energy. He struggled but returned in 2003,at the height of his powers as a batsman,to peel off a double century at Adelaide that won India a famous test.

He scored many in that phase,most of them away and throughout his career,his home and away averages have sat closely together. It is the mark of a genuinely great player. And it is away that the most memorable innings were played; in New Zealand in 1999,England in 2002,Australia and Pakistan in 2003-04 and in the West Indies in 2006. To that extent,he was the true successor to Sunil Gavaskar.

His father will be proud of that. Oh,we family folk are suckers for that kind of sentiment! In 1994,when I used to do the highlights of domestic cricket for ESPN,his father would often call to ask if he could get the highlights of his son’s batting. The request was always politely made and a thank you was always offered every time I met him. You can see the shyness in the genes,the correctness. I don’t mention it lightly. In our obsession with saluting the here and now we sometimes ignore what produced success. If Dravid Sr was proud of his young man,Rahul was proud enough of his mother to be the photographer when she received her PhD. It might seem like a small thing to do but it tells you a lot about the person. Giant edifices are built on solid foundations.

And so it is with a touch of emotion that I will say goodbye to India’s finest number three player. He wasn’t the Wall,not for me. Yes,his defence was as perfect as it could get,his steeliness admirable,but he played shots that warmed the heart. The cover drive with the big stride forward and the prettiest of them all,the whip through mid-wicket played so late and while so nimble on his toes.

He will be missed,but the greats always are. He will see his children grow,take them to school,imbibe in them the reading habit (for he read more than most people I know and couldn’t understand why others didn’t!) but from time to time he must tell the new flowers that will inevitably bloom in our cricket of the need to put grit over beauty,team over self,challenge before rejection,humility before arrogance for that is what he stood for.

Well played my friend. You have the honour of leaving the game richer with your legacy and none of us can ask for anything more than that.

The writer is a Mumbai-based cricket commentator.