Rahul Dravid: The gift of reassurance
-- Rohit Brijnath
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He wore polished shoes but never an aura. In a world of Gods, he preferred his humanness, an unadorned man battling his own imperfections with a low-key dignity.
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Dravid took cricket seriously but not always himself. Or you. During the 1999 World Cup, on watching me take a few casual swipes with his bat, he fell off his hotel bed laughing and offered this advice: “Please, don’t ever write about technique”. His batting could be classical, yet he never viewed himself as the classical hero. As he said: “My only qualification is that I come on television more than a nurse or a soldier or a teacher. Anyway, I don’t think sportsmen can really be considered heroes.” Indeed, in the evening after his retirement press conference, he suggested with amusement that his immediate future included “practising my new sweep shot with a broom”.
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Laxman offered me art, Sehwag liberation, Tendulkar consistent genius, but Dravid taught us that reassurance is a gift. For such a neat man, he loved an ugly scrap. Runs might emerge in unsightly dribbles -- sometimes it was as if to be uninhibited was an act of immodesty for him -- but he’d keep going, a leave, a block, a block, a leave, and this should have been boring -- and well, yes, sometimes it was -- except by the end he’d built a lead, or rescued a situation, or offered us a winning chance and you’d look at this man, shirt bound by sweat, ferocious in his concentration, and just think, bloody hell. Struggle, in all its forms, was his hymn.
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And so even as he spoke easily with journalists, his finest conversations were his internal dialogues, which on request he would articulate. After his brilliant match-winning innings in Adelaide 2003, he said: “You can’t concentrate for 10 hours, you switch on and off, you push yourself, your mind wanders, you bring it back, you steel yourself. That’s the real beauty, when you win the battle against yourself.” And he wanted to win, and if he took defeat manfully he also did so painfully. On the night after India had exited the 2007 World Cup under his captaincy, on the phone he sounded as if he was dying.
ரொம்ப நல்லாவே எழுதியிருக்காப்ள! மிக்க நன்றி ரோஹித்! :clap: :clap: