Sage

He knows what's up

Coach Dravid. There is a ring to this three-note motif. The words carry weight, but slip off the tongue like a gentle melody, floating around its subject. This is a man who spent a career as the spine of the most popular batting lineup in the world. The coach who, even during a Test match, finds time for a book on the changing winds in his sport. The tactician who, mere months after taking the highest profile coaching job in the sport, calls up a PhD student in Cosmology to understand the possibilities of mining ball-tracking data.

In the last couple of months, there has been a beeline for him. High offices, blank cheques, keys to an entire team - all offered like tributes to a reluctant deity. He would’ve hoped for some shuteye after thirty relentless months as India coach, but a World Cup title was always going to generate new attention. Everyone wants to bottle a bit of that golden magic now. The song is catching on.

About time too. Rahul Dravid enjoys a rare fandom in India. He is the model athlete and celebrity, the thinking fan’s champion. 

When he first came to us, we were quick to box him - the nice guy with a technique you could bet your house on. But Dravid kept piling on the runs, outgrowing the sidekick’s costume until it split at the seams. He became the go-to man for 10/3 and 150/1, on a greentop at Melbourne or a highway at Mohali.

And he did all that without the divine touch of Tendulkar and Lara, or the impossible quality of Kallis. He wasn’t a rock band frontman like Ponting either. So, he just turned his career into a relentless pursuit of excellence. Like a bird exploring new heights and techniques of flight, he evolved with every season, and came back with more tools in his shed, more shots than we thought he could pull off. On his first Test tour to Australia, he barely got a run; on his second, just four years later, he scored more than 600 in 4 Tests.

But, equally, as the country got more ambitious, entitled, and louder with every passing week, Dravid held up something that elicited silent gratitude from those watching: dignity. At a recent ceremony, Matthew Hayden, once the embodiment of on-the-nose Australian aggression, was asked to speak on his experience of playing against Rahul Dravid. He had a lot of praise for the cricketer, but even more for the man.

“Under pressure, Australia put everything on the line against Rahul. He responded with great grace, great composure, and always a great sense of fairness. In a game which can tempt you to win at all costs, Rahul Dravid won on the principles of cricket and the principles of life.”

Rohit Brijnath once wrote that Roger Federer floats on grass and wears his fame like a lightweight jacket. Is it completely unreasonable to steal that line and use it for Rahul Dravid?

As if his playing career wasn’t enough, Dravid’s coaching tenure has added more rungs to the pedestal that was already touching the sky. His success with the Under-19 team, the National Cricket Academy, and recently, the India men’s team, has taken him to a new plane now - part coach, part sage, but with salt-and-pepper hair and the voice of an ASMR artist.

This week, Coach Dravid’s latest destination was made public - head coach of the Rajasthan Royals in the IPL. They announced him through a YouTube video. And, bless him, Dravid still wears the typical sheepish smile. He seems embarrassed by the cameras pointed at his face, wishing they’d rather click him in training gear and sunglasses at his natural habitat.

All reports suggest that Dravid picked Rajasthan Royals for reasons of loyalty, having played there for three years before retirement. But, even if inadvertently, it’s the perfect pick. For starters, the lack of constant hyperventilation - reserved for Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians, and Royal Challengers Bangalore - will help. But more importantly, the RR team management encourages a progressive approach to T20 cricket. They aren’t afraid to back youngsters over greying veterans, or flip their batting order just to disorient their opponents.

The coach’s role is changing in cricket. Unlike football, hockey, or basketball, cricket is a captain’s game. The captain selects the team and handles the tactics. The head coach has traditionally been more of a manager - the one making sure all the pieces fit, that the machine runs smooth.

But now, with all the limited-overs formats of the game promoting an explosive tempo, there is a higher upside for tactical tweaks. A well-placed fielder or a clever trap can turn a game. That’s where Rahul Dravid’s eyes begin to light up.

At last year’s World Cup final - apologies for bringing it up - Australia used the slow black soil pitch, made slower and drier by the baking Ahmedabad sun, as a weapon against India’s rampaging batting order. With massive boundaries on each side of the pitch, they bowled short, repeatedly. They set fields to choke the preferred angles for Indian batters. The result: between overs 11 and 40, India scored a shocking 117 runs, hitting only two fours, and no sixes. With evening dew guaranteeing a faster and truer pitch for Australia to bat on, the game was locked before the interval. Rahul Dravid was on the wrong end of the result that evening, but he would’ve appreciated the ingenuity of the plan.

The best coaches, you'll find, are incurable nerds. They'll break down their own sport to crumbs, and sometimes, happily wander outside to look for usable nuggets of information. For example, Cesar Luis Menotti, a World Cup-winning Argentina coach and a cult figure in football, was a frequent visitor to the Pakistan hockey team’s training sessions during the 1978 Hockey World Cup. Menotti was impressed by coach Waheed Khan’s use of wingers, and wanted to learn the trick in person.

Amongst the many things we appreciate Dravid for - and long may it continue - his intellectual curiosity and acumen get left behind. That said, these aren’t new jackets in his closet, not something he has picked up along with grey hair. He has always had the eye for detail, the knack for seeking patterns.

And he left us enough clues too. We rarely mention Dravid amongst India's most notable captains. He’s an afterthought, marked as the bridge between two more celebrated reigns, his tenure defined by the abysmal capitulation at the 2007 ODI World Cup. But there was so much more.

Handed the long-term captaincy in the middle of Hurricane Greganguly, Dravid’s first major assignment came in Pakistan. On a dry, sunny afternoon at Lahore, with the ODI series tied at 1-1, Dravid won the coin toss. Convention, history, the weight and state of the series - all whispered “bat first.” Dravid elected to field. India won. That match, by the way, is better remembered for Pervez Musharraf complimenting Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s blonde-mane hairstyle and sending MSD’s burgeoning reputation as a cult hit straight to the stratosphere. He would become the fulcrum for the shift that had been set in motion by his captain.

In the remaining two games, Dravid won the toss twice and elected to field both times. India won both games. They took the series 4-1, all four wins coming via chases. The middle order core of Yuvraj Singh, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, and Suresh Raina was given its first hard run, and the results were stupendous¹.

India were traditionally bad chasers. Dravid, with the help of those three generational middle-order batters, turned that around. In the book Timeless Steel, a series of essays written about Rahul Dravid, Greg Chappell heaps glowing praise. “To learn how to get better at chasing a target, Rahul kept asking the opposition to bat first, no matter the conditions. Under his leadership, India won nine ODIs in a row against Pakistan and England.”

Dravid also took India to Test series wins in England and West Indies, ending two decades of wait for a Test series win outside Asia. He is well-celebrated as a batter, but he was a better strategist than we give him credit for.

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Every year, like clockwork, a clip from 2008 goes viral on social media. It’s from that year’s Sydney Test, showing Dravid blocking ball after innocuous ball from Andrew Symonds and Stuart Clark - decent bowlers, but hardly world-beaters. The video is captioned with something like, “The essence of Rahul Dravid” followed by an array of heart emojis. It gets thousands of likes and retweets.

That clip would make Dravid squirm, and not from an excess of modesty. He played a shocker that day. He got stuck at a time when India desperately needed him to push the game forward. India would eventually lose the game, and go behind in the series 2-0. But the clip endures, feeding into the bright but one-dimensional image we've constructed of Rahul Dravid in our minds.

That reputation dragged on well into his coaching career. When he got the Under-19 coaching job, there was a muted fear that the kids, while benefiting tremendously from his knowledge, might need someone with a more aggressive bent of mind. Those fears were first put to rest by his approach. Dravid poured his energy into preparation, took his troops on a world tour of cricket, worked on their technical skills, and then stepped back to let them choose their tone and timbre of expression.

Any remaining concerns about Dravid imposing his own preferences onto his team were then wiped clean by the results. At the 2018 Under-19 World Cup, India’s batters looked a league above everyone else, comfortable in all conditions and styles; the fast bowlers - still growing into their bodies - were consistently clocking 90 miles an hour. Prithvi Shaw, Shubman Gill, and Arshdeep Singh are graduates from that batch of The Rahul Dravid Finishing School.

At the National Cricket Academy, he wanted to fix the longest-running problem in India’s cricket pipeline: the gap between domestic and international cricket was too wide, the jump too jarring. And so, under him, the NCA transformed the India-A programme. The India-A team became an elite development project. They played red-ball games all year round, toured Australia and South Africa often, and were given full access to state-of-the-art coaching and sports science at the NCA headquarters in Bangalore. Cue: Mayank Agarwal, Karun Nair, Mohammed Siraj - airdropped into tough debuts, excelling before their profiles could be fully updated on Wikipedia.

After the inevitable move to the India job, he was quick to focus on the elephant in the room: in T20s, India were stuck in second gear while the world zoomed past them with nitrous oxide-boosted sports cars. With three white-ball World Cups on the horizon, a complete overhaul was not just important, but imperative. Dravid found a kindred spirit in Rohit Sharma, a captain and batter willing to evolve and push boundaries. Together, they began plugging the gaps and looking for edges they could use. Which is where Himanish Ganjoo, a full-time PhD student in cosmology and part-time data wizard, showed up on their radar.

Over a recent interview with cricket.com, Himanish shared his experience of working with the team. Here was a legend of the game, not just open to outside ideas but actively seeking them out.

“The credit for that goes to Rahul Bhai because he is the one who is forward-thinking and radical enough to begin this culture. His idea is always to design a culture within the team, and he was the one who started this. I can say, surely, that we were right up there with the best teams in the world in what we were doing in terms of the amount of data we were exploiting, how we were analysing it, and how deep we were going. Ultimately, only 1% of this makes it to the ground. But the important thing is that you do 100% of the research, and we were doing that.”

Conventional wisdom, the kind Dravid would have been educated in during his formative years, preaches caution in crunch moments. Keep it simple, stick to the basics, avoid risks. And yet, in the cauldron of a World Cup final, with the hopes of the team hanging by a thread, Dravid's India were brave enough to take a leap of faith. Axar Patel at number 5, above Hardik Pandya and Shivam Dube, six months after a similar, data-backed move - promoting a left-hander - had failed in another World Cup final. This one worked, decisively.

It was the same Rahul Dravid in Barbados as the one in Ahmedabad, Trent Bridge, and Lahore. Behind the softly spoken words is a man with an obsession for winning. Listen to Matthew Hayden again, this time from an interview in 2008.

“All this going around is not aggression. If you want to see aggression on the cricket field, look into Rahul Dravid's eyes.”

Rahul Dravid’s favourite book is Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. It’s the story of a seagull who doesn’t want to waste its life by fitting in with the rest of the flock. It gets ostracised, and begins pursuing its passion for flying by exploring every inch of the sky. It floats near the sea and soars above the clouds. It lives by the mantra of try, fail, learn, succeed. After a long time, when the seagull feels it has something to teach, it comes back to its flock and shows them a newer way of life.

Indian cricket did not get enough time with Captain Dravid. They will do well to take a leaf out of his book, spot the gaps, and not make the same mistake with Coach Dravid, the man whose knowledge and vision can only be matched by his generosity of spirit.

1. You probably don’t need reminding of the 2011 World Cup win. But do you remember what India’s middle-order looked like then, five years after that morning in Lahore? Also, India chased in the quarter-finals against Australia and finals against Sri Lanka. At the centre of it all: Yuvraj, Dhoni, Raina.