Rahul Dravid

It was still very early in the morning, but I didn’t care — I needed someone to explain to me why Rahul Dravid was not part of India’s 1996 World Cup squad. I called up one of the selectors and he offered this: “… a textbook-technique, perfect balance, but we need quick runs.”

I never really understood why people had problems with Rahul’s strike-rate, because for me cricket is a team game, and we need people with different strengths and weaknesses. Maybe he was too different, but I never really had any doubts about him.

I know we had missed a trick by not picking him up for the ’96 World Cup, and I was the happiest when he walked away with the man of the series award in the next edition of the tournament in England.

He used to keep wickets as a kid, but I think Gundappa Vishwanath persuaded him to only focus on his batting, which made sense.

Rahul, though, became a complete ODI cricketer when he started serving his team in the dual capacity during the 2003 World Cup. India surged because of that – it gave Sourav (Ganguly) a chance to reorganise the middle order.

Perfect leader

His captaincy stint lasted for two years, and I honestly thought the Indian team needed to have him as the leader for a few more.

It was not because I felt he was given a raw deal, when the captaincy was taken away from him after the disastrous 2007 World Cup campaign. But it was his work ethic – he used to come to the training session half-an-hour before the rest of the team, and was almost always the last to pack up.

Rahul was one of the best readers of the game I’ve seen, and the fact that his captaincy record isn’t that great has more to do with Greg Chappell being the coach than him being the captain.

There’s nobody who can go more in depth about how to play this game. I always used to tell the juniors that if you really want to understand how to play in tough conditions and keep your focus intact for hours, there’s no better teacher than Rahul Dravid. He has a strong connection with the game, and that makes him always work hard on his batting.

It’s not the fear of failure, or like many cricketers, trying to keeping up with the expectations. He will play cricket even in his free time, and if you ask him, he’ll be the last person to complain about the schedule.

I have not asked him about his future plans, and I dare not. He’s one of the fittest 38-year-olds you’ll ever see and he can easily carry on for the next few years. The ODI chapter may have come to end – for me it was closed two years ago when he was booted out of the team after a few matches – but Rahul’s service to the nation will continue.

As told to Sunit Kaul