The Trinity: Tendulkar, Ganguly, Dravid. Not since the three Ws of the West Indies — Worrell, Weekes and Walcott — who ruled the game in the 1950s, has any Cricket team seen a threesome of such talent, class and influence playing in tandem? And now their story’s coming to an end. It had to, at some point in time, but that cold logical axiom doesn’t make it any less sad. These three men have given more to Indian cricket than almost any others, and quite soon Indian cricket will have to live without them.
They are almost the same age, with Tendulkar the youngest. Dravid is 103 days older than him, and Ganguly is 187 days older than Dravid, which makes him 290 days older than Tendulkar. Tendulkar of course had been playing for India for seven years before Ganguly and Dravid made their Test debuts at Lord’s in 1996, but for the last decade the trio has been synonymous with the game in India (along with that old warhorse Anil Kumble). Conventional wisdom has always had it that Ganguly would be the first to go, since his game is more dependent on eyesight and reflex than the others’, so age would hit him earlier and harder. And that Dravid would be the last of the three to hang up his boots, since the rocksolid foundation of technique that his batting is built on would keep serving him even when the body becomes slower. No one ever placed any bets on Tendulkar’s departure. Tendulkar would decide when to retire.
Then Dravid gets dropped from the Indian one-day squad. Yes, he scored only 80 runs in his last 10 one-day innings, but one wonders if any cricket fan in India wanted him dropped, even though we understand the reasoning. In recent years, he was perhaps the most loved of the three, and certainly the most valuable player India had, at least in the longer — sorry, after T20, we now have to say ‘longest’ — version of the game. Of the three, he was the one who we could rely on the most, to stand alone on the burning deck, and quite often, manage to douse the fire. At Adelaide in 2003, after Dravid won the match for India, scoring 305 runs (233 in the first innings, 72 not out in the second), even a usually cautious Sunil Gavaskar was moved to...
