Rahul Dravid - Perfection Personified

"He's not good enough to play One Day Internationals", they said. 
How many people go on to score 10,889 runs in ODI cricket after being pulled down like that? 

With a methodical and technically perfect approach Rahul Dravid took Indian Cricket to a whole new level. His contribution alone is equivalent to the combined contribution of ten other successful players. May be the statistics don’t reflect this, but we all know to what extent he can go for any team he plays for.

When you don’t have a captain, you go to Dravid, you don’t have a wicket keeper, you ask Dravid to keep, you can’t find an opening partner for Viru, you promote him up the order. The comparison with Sachin is inevitable. Sachin was the reason I started watching Cricket, but Dravid gave me the reason to keep watching cricket. Unlike all big players Rahul Dravid  never played for his fans, he played for the team and HE PLAYED FOR THE GAME. He played Cricket the way it was intended to be played.

All those matches India lost, he played like a lone warrior without any support from the other end. All those matches he won for India, he played well, but in the shadow of someone who played slightly better. On so many occasions he has been our Wall of Troy standing between the invincible Aussies and India. Seldom did the Aussies find their Trojan horse to get through this wall.

Around 2007 when the T20 fever was on, many prophesied the end of Rahul Dravid. Four years later, he was the only batsmen in the team who looked good enough to tackle the English bowlers in the lone T20 match after the disastrous four-test tournament. He scored 31 in his first and only T20 game which included three beautiful sixes.

The controversy surrounding Rajasthan Royals hurt IPL. Despite that, the fans kept supporting the team, because they had their faith in Dravid. They knew, this man cannot do anything wrong.

Even the bowler would love to watch him play those syntactically perfect cover drives, brilliantly executed square cuts and those gorgeous straight drives.


He is like the Eddard Stark of Cricket. Not the king, but the most honourable man in the kingdom. The world may have given the title of Mr Cricket to Michael Hussey, but according to me, no one deserves this title more than Rahul Dravid. I don’t care what the statistics say, for me Rahul Dravid is the greatest test batsman and the greatest sportsperson India has witnessed.



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