Dravid and Sehwag added a second-wicket stand of 237 runs as India amassed 329-3 at stumps. "He (Dravid) played his
He is such an experienced individual, and knows his own game better than anyone else. When we bat together, we never have to say too many things to each other. There's a great understanding," said Sehwag.
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| Rahul Dravid on his way to a hundred against NZ at Motera yesterday. PIC/AFP |
>> With Gautam Gambhir Innings: 50, Runs: 2890, Highest: 233, Average: 60.20, 100 partnerships: 7
lWith Sachin Tendulkar
Innings: 19, Runs: 1230, Highest: 336, Average: 64.00, 100 partnerships: 3
>> With VVS Laxman Innings: 16, Runs: 493, Highest: 100, Average: 30, 100 partnerships: 1
Memorable Dravid-Sehwag partnerships:
410-run opening stand against Pakistan, Lahore, January 2006
268-run stand against South Africa, Chennai, March 2008
237-run stand against Sri Lanka, Mumbai, December 2009
http://www.mid-day.com/sports/2010/nov/051110-Virender-Sehwag-Rahul-Dravid-slow-approach.htm
To be fair, one has always been a Dravid fan. One has always realised that he was once upon a time the best batter in the country. But one always said that Dravid was getting old. And even before this innings one has had his/her own doubts. Did Rahul Dravid meritte his place in the side but one read this article which was only a few years old and one realised how forgotten a guy can be. In 2007 a guy wrote about him! A guy who a lot of us respected. Whom I respect!
Mukul Kesavan in his book 'Men in White', writes this.
Extravgantly Sound: Rahul Dravid
I look forward to some bilious critic attacking Rahul Dravid. It'll make for a change. The Press he getst so fawningly good; it would embarras a North Korean despot. I set out to write a hard-nosed, unillusioned assesement of an overrated batsman...and look what emerged.'
Rahul Dravid is a Paragon, the arch-gent of modern cricket. He's urbane, modest, resolute, dependable, well spoken and he even has a decnt line in self-deprecation. Asked in an interview, after a day;s playduring which he had completed a solid century, if he planned to go after Lara's new record, he instinctively came up with the graceful answer: 'For me to get 400,; he said, you would have to play a 6 day Test Match.'
But is he a great batsman? That's the big question, and there's a flottila of other, more specific que`stions that follow it in a close formation. Is he the greatest batsman ever to represent India? Does he have a claim to be the greatest batsman in the world today? If Rahul Dravid gets to an average of 60 (at 58.75 per innings, he;s within a double century of it) and retires at the big Six O, will the stattistical weight of this achievement allow him to lay claimn to being the greatest batsman of the last twenty-five years, greater than Tendulkar, Lara, Waugh, Gavaskar, Richards even?
Consistency at a very high level is an important part of being a great batsman; it' s why VVS Laxman will never be one. To play sublime innings every now and then isn't enough. On this score Dravid is the most dependable batsman India has ever produced, stattistically more reliable than Gavaskar, which is a staggering achievement.
I would arguew that Gavaskar faced the greater challenges: he opened the batting against better fast bowlers without a helmet, but a batsman can only play to the guhconditions he's given so that can't be held against Dravid. You could argue that Tendulkar in his pomp avergaed roughly what Dravid does today and he has made those runs at a greater rate. Morever to compare the figures of a completed career against one that's still a work in progress is misleading: averages taper off towards the end of a player's span and it is possible that two or three years from now Dravid's avergae will hover around the mid 50-s as Tendulkar's does, or, if he ekes his career out too long, the early 50's, which is where Gavaskar ended his wonderful career, Still, the fact that a pessmistic career forecast has Dravid declining to Gavaskar's statistical level, says something about the height at which he currently stands.
On nearly every count, Dravid's record is outstanding. He has by far the best record for an Indian batsman away from home, a crucial statistic for a team that's notoriously shaky at dealing with foreign conditions. He has played a string of big decisive innings tin the course of the last five years that have won Test matches for India abroad, most recently the two fifites he made in the summer of 2206 on an eccentric oitch in the West Indies.
But figures' arsn't everything. If they were, we wouldn't be asking the question we started with. Nobody asks it of Lara or Tendulkar anymore; we know they're great batsmen. So why -- despite the massive consistency of his record - do we not take Dravid's greatness for granted?
The simple answer is that Dravid has played all his cricket in the shadow of Tendulkar, regarded by many critics as the greatest batsman in the history of Indian cricket. By the time Dravid began playing Test cricket, Tendulkar was a Test star of seven year's standing. If the early nineties belonged to Lara, the second half of the decade was Tendulkar's. The seal on Tendulkar's pre-eminence was affixed by Bradman himself when he observed that Tendulkar's batsmanship resembled his own.Comig out from under Tendulkar's shadow was made even more dofficult by the fact that this grizzled veteran was younger than Dravid. It is natural for a young batsman to supercede the champion of the previous generation, as Tendulkar replaced Azharuddin. But prodigies like Tendulkar upset this sequence: a year older than the great Mumbaikar, it must have some times seemed to Dravid that he had been sentenced to second fiddle for life.
But through the last five years, Dravid by sheer weight of runs, has been the msot valuable batsman in the Indian side. That his peak has coincided with a relative decline in Tendulkar's performance has underlined his pre-eminence. Journalists and commentators elsewhere have acknolwedged with respect and admiration Dravid's achievement, but there has been no rush to celebrate the arrival of a new 'great'. This is partly because Dravid , having been around for ten years, isn't a new meteor in the night sky. It is the fate of the low-profile performers to be taken for granted.
Dravid is a great defensive batsman and the label 'great' is generally aaplied to batsmen who dominate the bowling, whose prefferd style, as with Lara and Tendulkar, is attack, not attrition. Attacking batsmen are sexier than defensive ones. The absolute truth of this can be demonstrated by a thought experiment. Sehwah opens the innings and falls early. Dravid walks in at his usual position at number three. Then the spectators notice long hair under the helmet and realise that Chappe;; has promoted Dhoni. The crowd erups, the stadium begins to fill, viewers everwhere out their lives on hold in anticipation of mayhem. And this is Dhoni, a cheerful Afridiesque brute, who makes no claim to higher batsmanship. Had Tendulkar in his pomp not walked in at his assignrd position in the batting order, collective disappointment would have rustled through the arena. Not so with Dravid. Dravif will never make your pulse race; acknowledging the greatness of those who do, lke Viv Richards or Tendulkar, come more easily, more naturally.
But this can't be the whole explnation. SMG played most of his innings in defensive mode and the Indian cricketing public wasted no time in hailing him as the greatest ever. This has something to do with his record-breaking series where he scored 776 runs in four Tests with thre centuries and two half centuries. In the greatness stakes, getting off to an early start helps (as with Tendulkar) as does and explosive one (as with Gavaskar). The fact that SMG was an opening batsman facing down fast bowlers which is dramatic and exciting in itslef. Also, Gavsakar generally closed out his centuries, unlike Dravid who through the st half of his career had the frustrating habit of getting himself out in the eighties and nineties. But even allowing for these differences, it's curious that we admire Dravid where once we stood in awe of Gavaskar.
I think the reason for this why Dravid is only just beginning to be given his due as a great batsman , has to do with his style of batsmanship. Spectators and cricket writers reserve their highest praise for batsTmanship that seems effortless. The oohs that follow Tendulkar's accentuated straight drive, the high elbow one, minus follow through, are our tributes to magic. The timing! The genius!
Dravid's batting style is the opposite of effortless. It's elaborate, flourishing and effortful and despite all that the Tendulkar or Sehwag. You seldom applaud a Dravid strokenfor it's power or timing. Energetic hook shotsndribble over the boundary line. Drives are hit hard into the ground and nothing is ever hit on the up. Every shot is preceded by a high flourishing backlift unlike Lara, whose backlift ends in high-risk shot maeratking, Dravid's arabesque, more oftern single. And the man-in-a-bunker- effect is exaggerated by Dravid's stance: low, dogged, sweat running off in rivulets.
Dravid doesn't fit the categories invented by a Coarse Cricket Writing to docket batsmen. Here a sound technique always implies a 'compact defence'. Well Dravid's defence isn't cvompact. It's extravagant. His wrists twirl, his bat loops before the ball is disciplined into the ground. Dravid is a great batsman who can do everything. Well Dravid's defence isn't compact; it's extravagant. His wrists twirl, his bat loops before the ball is disciplined in to the ground. Dravid is a great batter; he hooks he pulls, cuts, sweeps, flicks and drives, but his entirte technique is centred on the need to make sure that the ball hits the ground first.
If orthodoxy is shorthand for the coaching manuall or the prescriptions of the MCC, Dravid is the opposite of orthodox. Orthodox bntsmanship His methods aren't orthodox. It is important to say this if only because both critics and admirers describe him to as an orthodox batsman. For example Sambit Bal, paying tribute after Dravid had scored a series winning270 agst Pak in 2004 rote: Dravid's batsmanship has often been taken for granted because its so firmly rooted in orthodoxy,because it is utterly incomprehensible, and so utterly lacking in mysique'.
Dravid's defensive technique, on the other hand, is extravagant.. The bat describes a little scimitar before straightening. When he derives through extra cover
| Time Span | Tests | Innings | Not Outs | Runs | Average | 100s | 50s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 1996 Debut to March 1999 | 29 | 48 | 4 | 2395 | 54.43 | 5 | 16 |
| October 1999 to March 2000 | 8 | 16 | 0 | 426 | 26.63 | 1 | 0 |
| November 2000 to December 2006 | 67 | 112 | 18 | 6228 | 66.26 | 17 | 30 |
| December 2006 to November 2008 | 25 | 47 | 4 | 1317 | 30.63 | 2 | 7 |
| December 2008 to January 2010 | 10 | 17 | 2 | 1029 | 68.60 | 4 | 5 |
| January 2010 to October 2010 | 5 | 9 | 1 | 207 | 25.88 | 0 | 1 |
| Overall | 144 | 249 | 29 | 11602 | 52.74 | 29 | 59 |
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These are not easy times to be Rahul Dravid. In his previous innings, on home soil in Bangalore, he walked out to replace the man who many see as his eventual successor. Cheteshwar Pujara had batted with tremendous poise and fluency for 72 and the cheers for Dravid mingled with the applause for a future star. Murali Vijay, who made a hundred in the first innings of that game, had also shown himself to be someone capable of filling any breach in the top three.
Every time Dravid fails from here on, there will be clarion calls for youth. Even when he succeeds, there will be those who say that his presence at No.3 isn't beneficial for the long-term health of Indian cricket. In a country where those in their late 20s like Yuvraj Singh and Mohammad Kaif are considered past it, what chance does a soon-to-be-38-year-old have?
This century, his 30th, won't feature in the highlights reels of his career. The opposition wasn't the most taxing and the pitch, though two-paced, was little more than benign. But for a man who has struggled since two wonderful stroke-filled hundreds against Sri Lanka at the end of last year, this was a defining innings in more ways than one.
In his previous Ahmedabad appearance, he had taken India from 32 for 4 to over 400 with a 177 that was as full of intent as any innings he had ever played. This was a very different knock. With Sehwag playing as is his wont, even on a pitch where the ball didn't come on as you'd expect on the opening day of a game, he was becalmed for long periods early on. He faced 105 balls for his first 17 runs, and was fortunate when Gareth Hopkins failed to hold on to a bottom edge off Jesse Ryder when he had just 28.
But in the hour before tea, something changed. The feet started to move more decisively, and the strokes that had previously found the inner ring started to streak away through the gaps. In a passage of play where India scored 69 runs, Dravid made 44 of them. By the time the bat was raised for the hundred that took him past the greatest No.3 of them all, Sir Donald Bradman, he had made 83 from just 111 deliveries. With Sehwag slowing down as a result of a slight jarring of the knee, it was just what India needed to keep the pressure on.
Dravid would be the first to admit that he isn't as prolific as he once was. But leaving aside the statistical anomaly that was Bradman, the law of diminishing returns has affected the greatest of No.3s. Being the pivot of the batting order comes with its own pressures, and unlike those who bat lower down the order, there's no hiding from the dangers of the new ball.
Viv Richards averaged 55.18 with 15 centuries after his first 60 Tests. In his next 61, he made nine more hundreds, but the average dipped to 50.23. Ricky Ponting has suffered similarly. When Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath brought the curtain down on a golden generation with a 5-0 Ashes whitewash in Sydney, Ponting was averaging 59.29 with 33 hundreds. In 38 games since, he has made six centuries, but the mean has dipped to 54.68.
In Dravid's case, he ended the tour of the Caribbean in 2006 with two masterful half-centuries at Sabina Park, on a spiteful pitch where even Brian Lara was made to look ordinary. At that stage, 104 Tests into his career, he averaged 58.75 with 23 hundreds. In 41 matches since then, he has made seven centuries and 13 other scores in excess of 50. But the average is 39.65, largely a result of the failure to play the monumental innings that were once his forte. Only once, at Motera last year, has he gone past 150.
Something about batting with Sehwag brings out the best in him though. In some ways, as bizarre as it may sound, they are birds of a feather. The tempos may be very different but both trust in the method that has brought them so many runs. Sehwag, who has now added 3038 runs with Dravid (average of 63.29) from 50 innings, said as much after the day's play. "Rahul takes his time when he is batting," he said. "He is batting in his own style and I bat the way I want to. It's easier. We never discuss stuff like you should score fast or slow. He bats the way he knows and I bat the way I know."
Even when batting as fluently as he did in Ahmedabad last year, Dravid has never forced the issue with unnecessary innovations or improvisation. In that sense, he and Jacques Kallis remain a last tenuous link to the old ways of Test-match batsmanship.
Another missed catch - again Hopkins, but this time off Jeetan Patel - gave him a reprieve on 92, and there was more than a hint of fatigue about the shot that cost him his wicket with the close of play in sight. The snipers may have been temporarily deprived of ammunition, but yet again the big innings had eluded him.
How much longer can he go on? South Africa lie in wait at the end of the year, the pace and swing of Dale Steyn and the height and hustle of Morne Morkel. More importantly, how do the selectors view Indian cricket's future? If Pujara and Vijay are considered ready, would a tour of the Caribbean, against a team that's been in disarray for years, be a good place to blood them? Will Dravid walk of his own volition?
In some cases, form hasn't always been the prime consideration for moving a player on. Steve Waugh, another with resolve hewn from granite, averaged 76.61 in a final year bookended by Sydney Tests. Yet, with Michael Clarke waiting in the wings, it was decided that he needed to move on. Waugh would have loved another crack at India in India, but it was Adam Gilchrist and Ponting that led Australia as the final frontier was finally surpassed less than a year later.
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Watching his innings of two halves in Ahmedabad prompted the question: is Dravid too aware of his own mortality?
By playing with a bat Michael Hussey called "three metres wide", and doing so in his 38th year, Sachin Tendulkar doesn't only continue to give people a hard time, he gives hope to many others that if you stay around long enough, a second wind is possible. Of course it assumes that you will be picked in that period - some teams cull ruthlessly while others enforce temporary bans - and be fit enough to scour the horizon for that second coming.
I thought of that as I watched Rahul Dravid struggle his way through his first hundred balls in Ahmedabad. My mind, so full of admiration for a great cricketer, was willing him on, but younger, more irreverent, observers on my Twitter feed were calling for his head. Apart from a little purple patch in 2009, Dravid has been averaging in the thirties over three years (interestingly these numbers are very similar to those Tendulkar generated during his lean phase in the middle of this decade) and didn't always look like the great player he is.
Surely on a cruelly flat deck and against an attack that wasn't likely to scare a top team, he could have batted like the player we knew, or indeed like the player we saw after the shackles he had imposed on himself were broken and a century appeared. Or was it that Dravid was building bunkers around him, creating defences against every possible dismissal? Was he getting so caught up with survival that not getting out would seem a success?
A couple of days earlier I heard Sourav Ganguly say, on a news channel, that as a player moves past the mid-thirties he loses his confidence far more than he does his ability. And I wondered if that was the case with Dravid, surrounded as he is by young batsmen, who admire him but challenge him nonetheless. Was he so increasingly aware of his mortality, I wondered, that he was guarding himself against every possibility?
Sometimes players, like managers, can analyse in such detail that they end up thinking of weaknesses that may or may not exist. Batsmen can start preparing for every possible way in which they can get out. As patients get older, they worry about infections cropping up from just about anywhere, where in younger days they might have drunk water out of a tap at a railway station, or jumped out of a tree oblivious to injury. Batsmen can therefore start focusing too much on not getting out rather than on scoring runs.
Indeed, watching cricket in that phase you couldn't help thinking that one player, Virender Sehwag, was looking for an opportunity to score, while another, Dravid, was searching for safety. One seemed to enjoy being out in the middle, like a kid might on a rollercoaster, while the other was gritting his teeth like he was preparing for an assignment on the implications of Bernoulli's Principle. (And given that the passage of a ball through air tends to be governed by the work of the aforementioned gentleman, he probably wasn't too far away anyway!)
Having said that, Dravid could well counter the point saying that he has addressed every match the same way in the last 14 years, and has an extraordinary body of work to support his thesis; that on another day Sehwag might look flippant and the gravitas that Dravid exudes might be more reassuring; that being a man of erudition, a deep thinker and an analyst, has always worked for him.
As it turned out, a century duly arrived, one that took him past Bradman's 29 - once considered as unattainable as a four-minute mile was - at a strike rate better than that achieved over his career. The second half of his innings, in terms of balls faced, produced 80% of his runs. The certainty that Dravid exuded through a glittering career was back, the feet had started to glide, and the bat was searching for runs where it had been intent on guarding the wicket.
Did the confidence that Ganguly was talking about return? Did a voice tell him that putting money in a locker was not much good in a bull market? And will this century, and the accompanying confidence, lead to the second wind, the kind Tendulkar has shown?
I do not know. But what I do know is that beyond a point, the more you analyse, the more you budget for failure. Now that may be good for Obama's security entourage but not necessarily so for quality cricketers.
Ahmedabad: Flamboyant opener Virender Sehwag on Thursday said he and Rahul Dravid did not discuss even once their different batting styles even as they struck contrasting centuries on the opening day of the first cricket Test against New Zealand here.
While Sehwag was his usual aggressive self, scoring a quick hundred, Dravid took time to get into groove and gradually improved his strike rate.
Sehwag’s 173 came off 199 balls while Dravid took 227 balls for his 104-run knock.
In the process, they shared a splendid 237-run stand for the second wicket, their 10th century-stand, and helped India reach a solid 329 for three at close.
Sehwag said they were talking to each other regularly but ‘how to get runs’ never became a topic.
“I play my way and he plays his way. He has his own style and I bat in my style. We were chatting a lot but not on how quickly he should score or I should. He knows how to get runs and he got them,” said Sehwag, who had put on a mammoth 410-run stand with Dravid at Lahore in Pakistan in 2006.
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Sehwag said the hosts are looking to pile up a total in excess of 500 tomorrow to put New Zealand under pressure.
“We are looking at 500 or 550. If we can reach there we can put pressure on the New Zealand batsmen as the wicket is a slow and I think it will start to turn on the third or fourth day,” said Sehwag who slammed his 22nd Test ton, said.
Sehwag said he hurt his right knee when he fell down while running between the wickets in the morning and the pain became intense after tea.
“Till tea I was batting well but after tea there was pain in the knee and I could not concentrate,” said the Delhi dasher, who struck 24 fours and a six in his 199-ball essay.
Sehwag’s hundred was his sixth in just the last 13 Tests in just over a period of 12 months, during which he and Sachin Tendulkar have been the bulwarks of the Indian batting.
The Delhi dasher had come into the match with five 100-plus and one 200-plus scores.
Asked about the wicket, Sehwag said it was good to bat on in the morning before it got slower.
“The wicket is okay. It depends on the bowlers, how to use it. In the morning the ball came on to the bat and we scored over 120 runs. It’s becoming slow,” he said.
Sehwag said the Kiwis new-ball attack was a bit handicapped by the fact that Chris Martin, though experienced with over 50 Tests under his belt, was bowling for the first time in India while Hamish Bennett was making his debut.
“One bowler is not experienced in bowling on Indian wickets while the other is a debutant. Bennett is a good bowler and would learn from this experience. He has an awkward action which is a bit difficult to pick,” he said.
Asked about Tendulkar approaching a new landmark, his 50th Test ton, Sehwag said the champion batsman approaches every match as if it was his first.
“It’s important to treat every match the same way and that’s what he does. He always plays like it is his first Test, in a similar way,” he said.
PTI
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He stopped his cover drive with a frown, as two saree clad groundswomen approached the stroke's vicinity, dragging along with them a squeaky roller. The women stopped just short of him, pulling the burden back from where it came. Watching them recede, he moved back and across, and with eyes focused over his clasped wrists, he executed the text book defence. As he held the pose with grace, the electronic lawnmower swallowed stubborn tufts of grass with a chugging din inside the square, while loud painters splashed their drenched brushes on the smoothened side of the carpet-like lawn.
As the sun sunk below the smoggy Ahmedabad horizon, Rahul Dravid found serenity amidst the surrounding chaos, shadow practicing on the pitch with incredible poise and zeal.
There was no willow in grasp, but his full repertoire of strokes was on display. From the supple drop of his wrists to the crunching hoick over mid-wicket, Dravid toiled for the second time on Tuesday, long after the official net session was over. He was leaving no stone unturned to get it right at Motera: a venue where he has demolished several tangible oppositions before; including his next, New Zealand.
As he crept out of the restricted area to join his waiting team-mates in the parking lot, the frown had turned into a pursed lip smile. In Dravid's world of insulated emotions, it was the equivalent of hip roaring laughter. Despite the odds stacked against him, the reasons to celebrate were plenty. Both his forthcoming opponents and the Sardar Patel Stadium have been more than kind to Dravid in the past.
Even though the batsman is struggling with a lean patch (346 runs in this calendar year at 34.60) leading upto the first Test against New Zealand, one look at his numbers in this city will give even his sternest critics hope aplenty.
His career Test average of 52.73 gets amplified to 60.54 in six matches at the Motera, helped of course with a fifty, a century and a double ton against the Kiwis in 2003. His numbers against New Zealand both home and away are impeccable too, averaging 59.90, with four out of his 29 tons coming against the Black Caps. The combination of the two - against the Kiwis at the Motera - churns out a stunning 85 runs per innings from Dravid's blade.
Turning the tide?
As the cricketing cliché goes, all it takes is one innings to turn the tide, and nobody knows that better than the 37-year-old. It was on this very ground that Dravid embarrassed both his critics and the visiting Sri Lankan bowlers last year, when he scored 177 runs in a day to complete the rescue act, after India were 32/4. That innings had ensured that both his dry spell with the bat and hushed calls for him to be dropped had come to a rude end.
Come Thursday, Dravid will have to do it all over again. For India may have beaten the Aussies without any meaningful contributions from him last month and will probably do it again against the Kiwis, but if they are to stand a chance in South Africa over three Tests starting December, the team will require Dravid's expertise more than ever.
With the bigger picture in mind, Dravid will need Ahmedabad more than ever to turn the tide. And if the knock is anything like what he managed last year against the Lankans, it won't be long before he swaggers right back into national consciousness. The obstacles and distractions are plenty, but if Tuesday evening is anything to go by, Dravid is already ready for action, before even a single ball is bowled.
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It's definitely not a shove. Perhaps it's a gentle tap on his shoulder. Only Rahul Dravid can tell. Is Dravid feeling the pressure from the youngsters? Or is it an illusion in our minds? In the seven games he has played in 2010, Dravid averages 34.60. It's a dip from his high standards, of course, but is it cause for concern?
Cricinfo's Numbers Game recently traced his decline since 2007. Have a look; it isn't pretty. It felt worse when he was hit by a Shahadat Hossain bouncer and put in a Dhaka hospital in January this year. Indian fans have this thing about bouncers and their legendary batsmen. At least the older generation does.
They will tell you how Sunil Gavaskar was never hit on his head by a bouncer. They gasped and saw it as the end of their world when Gavaskar had his bat knocked out of his hand by a snorter from Malcolm Marshall in 1983. So when Dravid went down in Mirpur as if he were shot, for some it would have felt like a signpost of Dravid's decline, and not just a misjudgement of bounce.
In nine innings after that knock, Dravid has made one fifty, in the first Test against Australia. He has fallen to left-arm seamers a few times, chasing deliveries well outside the off stump. He has always looked to get on to that front foot; at times he has ended up chasing deliveries that could have been left alone. Some have said that his back leg remains rooted to the same spot now and it has meant that he has been stretching and playing well away from the body. Others have rubbished that as unnecessary fussing over technique and it's foolish to think Dravid has suddenly developed chinks. Dravid himself hasn't said anything on the issue.
Today, he was as focussed as ever in his preparation ahead of the Test. He batted against throws from Gary Kirsten and also faced both spin and pace. When the flash bulbs and television cameras swung to Sachin Tendulkar as he walked in to the nets, Dravid took a break and relaxed by talking to the umpires. But it wasn't long before he went in for an extra session and faced Ishant Sharma and Zaheer Khan. A couple of deliveries leaped past his outside edge and he jabbed and pushed out a couple others before the shots started to flow and the feet started to move. His fans will hope that everything falls in place in the Tests against New Zealand and Dravid can get in a groove for the sterner test ahead in South Africa.
There was another man who batted today alongside Dravid at the nets who might also feel a bit of the heat. Gautam Gambhir's 2010 average is worse than Dravid's - he averages 27 from 6 games. He has been afflicted with injuries and been in and out of the side. In his absence, M Vijay has performed admirably, so India is not without options. Gambhir's greatest test will come in South Africa. There we will learn how he handles pace and bounce. It won't hurt him if he prepares for it with a big innings or two against New Zealand. Will Dravid and Gambhir turn things around against New Zealand? We won't have to wait long to find out.
http://www.cricinfo.com/india-v-new-zealand-2010/content/current/story/485043.html
Three of Karnataka's greatest ever cricketers - Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad - will contest elections to the state cricket association (KSCA) on November 21. A fourth, Rahul Dravid, will not contest but has indicated to his former team-mates that, if they win, he will be part of the administration in some capacity.
"We are all in this together," Prasad told ESPNcricinfo.
Kumble, Srinath and Prasad have all held administrative posts with the BCCI and the ICC. Kumble was named the chairman of the National Cricket Academy in September, while Srinath has been an ICC match referee for the past few years. Prasad, currently the bowling coach with Chennai Super Kings in the IPL, has coached the India Under-17 team and the Karnataka Ranji team and was the bowling coach of the national side for two years. He wa sreported last week to have accepted an assignment with the Asian Cricket Council to promote the game and groom talent in the non-cricketing parts of the continent.
Their entry marks the exit of an earlier generation of cricketers from the KSCA , led by its current secretary Brijesh Patel and including GR Viswanath, Syed Kirmani and Roger Binny. "With the changing times I'm of the belief that fresh energy, new ideas and young feet are always good for an institution," Patel said in a statement released on Tuesday. "We are lucky that we have Kumble, Dravid, Srinath and others willing to sacrifice their time and energy to take Karnataka cricket forward."
Patel and his generation of players came into administration in 1998, and he's been secretary since then.
"I've seen these cricketers closely and I've immense faith and utmost confidence in their ability and commitments to make KSCA a model association," he said. "My team and I have decided to extent unstinted support to this cause. I also appeal to all members of the KSCA to support this young team.
“The fortress could also describe Rahul. Because once, Dravid was set, you needed the bowling equivalent of a dozen cannon firing all at once to blast him down.”...
