Dravid the classical accumulator

Source: The Guardian Newspaper     Date: July 21, 2002

Interview: India's number three tells Jon Henderson how he has flourished in Tendulkar's shadow

Heavy scorers do not have to be like Marcus Trescothick, who looks as though he developed his power labouring in a Mendip quarry. Rahul Dravid, tall but slightly built, reminds you that so many of the great run accumulators have been raw-boned men whose priceless gift has been timing. During the interview he spends most of the time working his way carefully through a Caesar salad, wielding knife and fork with fingers as long and delicate as tendrils.

When he arrives at Lord's on Thursday, Dravid, a single man of 29, will be returning to the scene of his Test debut. Six years ago, he and another newcomer to the Indian side, Sourav Ganguly, shared a 94-run sixth-wicket stand that was the key to their team having the better of a drawn game.

Ganguly's 131 gained the greater attention, but Dravid's 95, which mixed impeccable defence and devastating retribution on the loose ball - his square cut is as majestic as that of the great Rohan Kanhai - was, if anything, more remarkable. Coming in at number seven with five wickets down for barely 200, he was chiefly responsible for the lower order mustering more than half the first-innings total of 429. Not bad for a batsman who did not play on grass until he was nearly 17.

Dravid has played in 60 Tests, scoring 4,733 runs at an average of 51.44, the sort of return achieved by only the most accomplished. With his classical right-hander's style, he is a hoarder of runs rather than a rapacious gatherer, which is one reason he has never gained the same popularity with Indian crowds as Sachin Tendulkar. But if he does not crush attacks, he can fillet them mighty effectively. The most notable of his 10 Test hundreds was the 180 he scored in India's remarkable win over Australia in Kolkata in March last year, during which he totally mastered Shane Warne's leg spin.

Ten years before his Lord's debut, Dravid was a schoolboy growing up in Bangalore (birthplace, incidentally, of Colin Cowdrey), where there was very little live cricket on television and the only grass pitch in the vast industrial city was at the Test stadium.

Even so, Dravid - his father a production manager in a jam-making factory, his mother a professor of architecture at Bangalore University - was attracted to cricket at an early age. 'Like most young Indian kids I grew up playing on the roads and small plots of land that we could find near our homes,' he says. 'The area where I lived was not as well developed as it is today and the boys on my street would start up impromptu games with just a tennis ball and a bat. That was where my interest in the game started.'

At St Joseph's High School in Bangalore, the cricketing facilities were rudimentary. Dravid recalls that at the end of each school day, a net was put up and a mat laid out for the school team to practise on and matches at the weekend were played on grassless playing fields. 'The whole week children would run on the grounds and run on the wicket and on Saturdays and Sundays the school would put a little water in the middle, roll it a little bit and put out a mat on it.' It was not until he played for the Karnataka under-17 team that Dravid first encountered a grass playing area.

He describes the matting pitches as unrealistic, with a much higher bounce than on turf, but says the schoolmaster who taught him was very strong on the basics and developing a good technique - and the young Dravid was clearly an exemplary pupil. Aged 17, he made his first-class debut and scored his maiden hundred in his second innings, 134 for Karnataka against Bengal. He played first for India in one-day games before making the Test side on the 1996 tour of England.

One Indian cricket writer started a piece on him recently by transcribing the seven times table and saying that if Indian cricket were mathematics, Dravid was the multiplication tables. Not as fascinating as trigonometry or as puzzling as calculus, but indispensable. Dravid says of his batting: 'I wouldn't say I'm defensive, but I think sometimes the situation demands that I put down a solid foundation for the strokemakers to follow. I enjoy doing that. I enjoy batting for long periods. I enjoy frustrating people.'

He dismisses the notion that being in the same side as Tendulkar has affected his batting. 'I've never looked at it that way. I mean it's been a huge honour to play with Sachin, to share the same dressing room as him. If anything his presence has helped me and been good for my cricket. I've always batted the way I know I can bat.'

Regular watchers of Indian cricket remember only one instance of Dravid's placid demeanour giving way to anything approaching histrionics. It was during that innings of 180 against Australia when a gesture to the press box was reported as an angry response to reporters who had accused him of being unable to master Test attacks of quality. He says now that it was misunderstood and that it was nothing to do with what had been written about him.

'We'd copped a lot of criticism as a team and no one gave us a chance in that series or in that game. [Australia had won a record 16 Tests in a row before that.] Then to turn it around was a huge emotional thing. So it wasn't meant at anyone in particular, it was just that I felt that the team needed a bit more respect and that we had been written off too quickly.'

Our conversation ends on an unexpected note. A question about his interests beyond cricket leads him, via a resumé of the books he likes to read (mainly a mix of biographies and fiction), to a discourse on the environment, specifically the tigers of south India and the forests they live in.

'Obviously when you save the tiger, which is at the top of the food chain, you end up having to save the entire forest as well. So you use the tiger as a symbol and it helps to conserve the forest as a whole. I and some team-mates have done a little work on this. A very little, though. There's a lot more that needs to be done.'

Rahul Dravid. More than just a pretty defensive stroke.

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