Head coach Rahul Dravid’s likelihood to alter his persona

A number one man going through unprecedented strain extending past the sphere, a coach trying to kickstart the stint by shedding his good boy picture, and a buoyant pacer primed to breathe fireplace into the assault towards an opposition led by a dogged man prepared for powerful contests and harder conversations at dwelling.India’s tour of South Africa is about to be the stage for overarching narratives.
If Rahul Dravid had been to commerce his bat for a pair of boxing gloves, brandish a drooping moustache and develop lengthy sideburns, he would nonetheless not purchase the meanness or ruggedness of a pugilist. Or for all his perfectionism, would wrestle to slide into his favorite film character, Gabbar Singh from Sholay. For, there’s a deeply entrenched un-erasable picture of Dravid as mellowed and measured, dignified and swish, with the bat in addition to phrases. A great-boy picture, as Dravid himself describes.

#WorkforceIndia had an intense nets session 💪🏻 at SuperSport Park 🏟️ within the construct as much as the primary #SAvIND Test.
Here’s @28anand taking you nearer to all of the motion from Centurion. 👍 👍
Watch this particular characteristic 🎥 🔽https://t.co/Dm6hVDz71w pic.twitter.com/qjxnBszmDa
— BCCI (@BCCI) December 20, 2021
There have been occasions when he felt imprisoned on this picture. He tells Gaurav Kapoor in an episode of Breakfast with Champions, in half-jest and half-seriousness: “I am trying to create that image that I am not a good guy.” He pauses earlier than abruptly placing on a stern, dour face, just for the masks to peel off. He giggles, self-mockingly to indicate that anger doesn’t come naturally for him, and tells why he desires to burn the good-boy picture that adorns the heads and hearts of a technology of cricket watchers. “If you get labelled as a good boy, as someone who does everything correctly, when you make one mistake, that gets highlighted even more. ‘Oh, he threw his cap!’”

The cap-flinging incident, which when it occurred was in comparison with the sighting of Haley’s Comet, got here after Rajasthan Royals, the Indian Premier League staff he was teaching in 2014, misplaced a humdinger towards Mumbai Indians, thereby shedding their play-off likelihood. “That’s the image I want, that I am human,” Dravid says. The incident impressed the cult Indiranagar ka gunda commercial. The advert labored as a result of it was Dravid, as a result of he has hardly ever misplaced his mood on the sphere, as a result of he scarcely obtained dragged into scandals, or merely since you couldn’t think about him shedding his mood, on the sphere or on the street.

Undoubtedly, in his one-and-a-half-decade worldwide profession, Dravid has misplaced his cool a number of occasions, demonstrated his anger and dislike, argued and antagonised, maybe irked and shouted too. Yet, when one thinks of Dravid, these photographs barely stick out. Maybe, it’s how he desires the world to see him too. He displays on the cap incident as “not the proudest moment of my career,” and that he felt “so terrible when the cap was going out of my hand.” The good-boy picture is as pure as it’s nurtured.

Day 2️⃣ at coaching
The hustle continues 💪🏻
Let’s GO 👍🏻#WorkforceIndia #SAvIND pic.twitter.com/vfgp9zCOau
— BCCI (@BCCI) December 19, 2021
Yet, this garb has hid each his strengths in addition to flaws. Like an impenetrable armoury, it has obscured the true legacy of his captaincy, simply because it has shrouded his fallibilities. As an extension, it may proceed to affect, if not dictate, how one judges his teaching, no matter how his stint seems to be.
Not given his due
It was the reward and curse of his captaincy. His biggest achievement as captain — the collection wins in West Indies and England, the first-ever Test triumph in South Africa, or the Multan victory as a stand-in — is usually attributed to the comeuppance of India’s seamers. Johannesburg win is credited to S Sreesanth; Trent Bridge to Zaheer Khan, Multan to Virender Sehwag, and Kingston to Dravid the masterful batsman. Other accomplishments just like the nine-game unbeaten streak in ODIs, India’s greatest at the moment, and the 17 profitable run-chases at a time when India had been poor batting second, have been consigned as tutorial footnotes.
Conversely, his darkest hour — India crashing out of the 2007 World Cup within the group stage — is taken into account completely the top of India’s mess beneath coach Greg Chappell. His captaincy is neither praised, as say that of Sourav Ganguly or MS Dhoni or Virat Kohli, nor criticised as that of Sachin Tendulkar. Worse, he enters discussions on neither India’s greatest captains nor its worst.
So a lot is manufactured from Ganguly guiding India by the darkish days of the match-fixing scandal to the courageous new daybreak of victories, of moulding an identification of indefatigability, and of nurturing a crop of children – from Zaheer to Yuvraj Singh, and Sehwag to Harbhajan Singh. Dravid, too, took over the staff at a troublesome time, simply after the Chappell-Ganguly cleaning soap opera had performed out, when apparently lots of senior gamers had been disgruntled, and wished to get the script they wished for the ultimate chapter of their careers, when there have been extra aggressive small-town kids with an in-your-face angle cropping up.

Under Dravid blossomed a superb group of younger seamers. Under him Zaheer made his comeback from the brink; Sreesanth, RP Singh and Irfan Pathan blossomed. And bigger than them, Dhoni emerged. Sehwag as soon as recollected an incident that modified Dhoni’s profession. “When we were in Pakistan and MS Dhoni was a newcomer, he played a shot and got caught at point. Dravid was very angry with MS Dhoni. ‘That’s the way you play? You should finish the game.’ I was myself taken aback by the storm of English from Dravid, I didn’t understand half of it,” Sehwag recalled in a Cricbuzz video.
“But when MS Dhoni next came in to bat, I could see he was not hitting shots much. I went and asked him what was wrong. He said he did not want to be scolded by Dravid again. ‘I will finish quietly and go back,’ Dhoni said,” Sehwag added.

📸📸 from our coaching right here at the moment at SuperSport Park 🏟️#WorkforceIndia | #SAvIND pic.twitter.com/r5a890urkt
— BCCI (@BCCI) December 20, 2021
Dhoni and Yuvraj had been to don lead roles in a number of of India’s heady chases throughout that point in addition to within the coming years. Add Gautam Gambhir and Suresh Raina to the group, and India’s 2011-World Cup profitable core was assembled throughout Dravid’s tenure. Riding the wave of children and the expertise of veterans, he winkled out a greater win proportion (53) than each Ganguly (52) and Tendulkar (31) in ODIs. Under him, India experimented, performed aggressive cricket and, at one of the best of occasions, it was real enjoyable watching the staff, till all of it burst within the Caribbean in 2007.
It was the nadir of Dravid’s captaincy, but he confirmed stoic grace in duress. He stood behind his gamers, and even took some out for a film to defuse the strain. “He came up to me and Mahendra Singh Dhoni and said, ‘look, I know we all are upset, let’s go for a movie.’ We went for the movie and then we had half an hour to ask him things. He said, ‘yes, we lost this World Cup, we wanted to make a difference, but this is not the end of it; life is much bigger; we will come back tomorrow,’” Pathan recalled to Star Sports.
Instances to remorse
But the World Cup defeat would, undoubtedly, be a blot on his captaincy. Though Chappell was painted the villain, Dravid’s ineptness, seldom mentioned or dissected, too shines by. That the staff had too many discordant notes was a fault of each the coach and captain. Slotting Tendulkar at No. 4 might need been primarily Chappell’s choice, however Dravid may have interfered and briefed him about how the general public would have considered it, in case the transfer backfired. It did.
As an Australian, Chappell would have been averse to hero-worshipping, however Dravid may have, maybe, helped him perceive the Indian tradition higher.
More so, as Dravid has at all times asserted in press conferences that he was the one who known as the photographs. “At the end of the day, I take the call. Whether to decide to bat first or bowl first, or who plays in the XI, is finally my call. It always starts and ends with me,” he as soon as stated in Johannesburg, defending his choice to bat first on a spicy wicket, versus in style bowl-first knowledge in South Africa.
It was not the primary time his choices after profitable the toss had been scrutinised. Whereas the choice in Johannesburg labored gloriously, his ploy to insert England in Mumbai in 2006, floored miserably as India misplaced the match, to spoil the a hundredth Test of his profession. Dravid owned the error within the press convention, however nonetheless it reeked of tactical naivety.
There had been additionally situations when Dravid presumed that his strategies would work for his colleagues too. Like when a batsman was struggling for runs, he gave him a e book to learn when a pat on the again or a chat of encouragement would have sufficed. But Dravid’s rationale, as he defined later, was, “that was the way I grew up and played my cricket and there’s no reason why others can’t cope.” He grew up within the higher strata of the center class in a metro, however there have been these from Ranchi and Rae Bareilly, Kochi and Bharuch, whose understanding of life and sport had been completely different. Later, in his final tour as captain, Dravid took his teammates to an opera, which had a few of them apparently disenchanted.

During that tour, he emphasised on altering the nation’s cricketing tradition. “Our cricketing culture has to change, to some extent. It is an athletic game now and we have to instill these processes into our young cricketers. Our (National Cricket) Academy has got to become more professionally-run and we must manage our own contracted players much better,” he advised The Times. Years later, the NCA turned a breeding floor of India’s best next-generation gamers. Dravid was a visionary, who not solely thought deeply concerning the sport, but in addition visualised how it could change. His five-bowler ploy didn’t win many believers, nevertheless it turned Kohli’s default mode.
By the top of the tour, captaincy was a crown of thrones, although India gained a Test collection in England after 21 years. With the readability of thought that had emblazoned his batting, Dravid relinquished his place. “I enjoyed the captaincy, I loved it, but it can get tough after a while and some of the enjoyment can go away,” Dravid advised BBC. “So I believed it was the fitting time to step apart.’’ The frankness was considerable, although it’s unclear what was gnawing at him.

Quietly ended his roller-coaster captaincy journey, with neither adulation nor recrimination, each swept beneath the good-boy garb, or misplaced within the bigger position as an exemplary batsman he had donned for his nation.
Behind the veneer, there was a streak of ruthlessness too. The ruthless urge for food for perfection, to blunt the fiercest of assaults, to win video games and take daring choices (like declaring with Tendulkar six runs in need of a double hundred in Multan). A trait that endeared him to Steve Waugh, whose ears he picked throughout a dinner in 1998. “Rahul wanted the extra edge that would elevate his game to the next level,” Waugh later stated. Their relationship blossomed to friendship, and later Waugh selected him to pen the foreword of his autobiography.
He would take all of those virtues that outlined him — dignity of nature, devotion to the sport, composure of manner and ruthlessness in decision-making — into his teaching. Dravid would take that slice of good-boy picture too.
It’s laborious to consider a extra unanimous selection for a coach in cricket historical past, nevertheless it’s additionally the place his picture would face the sternest check, the place he will probably be judged on collection wins and trophy counts.Times have modified too —- there’s the impatient and unflinching gaze of social media, suspicious of historical past, 280 phrases that talk louder than a thousand. The calls for of the nation too have modified — solitary Test wins wouldn’t suffice, 100 or a five-wicket haul barely lights up their days, however India desires to be invincible, dwelling and overseas. Dravid wouldn’t be capable of survive on goodwill and fond reminiscences alone.
And as together with his good-boy picture, when he makes one mistake, it could get highlighted much more. Maybe, ultimately, the teaching stint would liberate him off the perception-prison.