like a round peg in a square hole

in the Indian ODI team, Mr Rahul Dravid.

rahul dravid

Rahul Dravid is not an ODI batsman.
It is time he accepted the reality of his position.
He was a baggage thrust upon the ODI team by Greg Chappell,
[Read here ...about his (Chappell's) relationship with Ganguly.
Their power struggle,
which resulted in Chappell giving the captaincy to Rahul Dravid]
an extra load the rest of the players have had to carry for twenty months.

Dravid’s natural game is nudge and run,
scoring more with running between wickets than boundaries.
He knows his weakness and as long as he has strike, the score is static
so always wants to give up the strike to players who are capable of hitting.
And sometimes take the risks of running singles, even when there are no runs in it.

This results in a high involvement in run outs. Dravid’s runouts in ODIs.
(Remember Yuvi getting run out in the World Cup at Dravid’s call?)

His stay at the crease is prolonged
because most of the time he is at the non strikers end without scoring.
This corelates with his high averages and SRs but in reality he slows down the runrate.
Leading into and in the World Cup, whenever he needed to up the rate he has got out.

[Simple arithmetic will say,
a run a ball for 50 balls will give
a SR of 100% and ave of 50 to infinity].
His SR stays in 40-50s because he scores a lot of singles per ball faced.

That is how he has build his legend as an innings builder, the “Wall”.
He shifts the onus to score rapidly (and take risks of getting out) on others.
In the past if others got out it did not bother him, captain took the blame for failures.

Not anymore it doesn’t;
he doesn’t like it, for the buck now stops with him.
And now if Sachin and Saurav plays slowly he is not happy
and will not have them in the team, he feels more comfortable with Sehwag and Uthappa.

Reading around the blogsites and forums,
so many voices are today ridiculing Sachin and Saurav for batting slowly.
Dravid has been doing it for years, if it is fine by him, it should be fine for everyone.
Everyone has the right to play safe and score runs to cement their position in the team.

We look at Dravid’s umpteen 50+s and go ‘wah! wah’!
Never consider the psychological effect his slow selfish style has on other batsmen.

Chappell tried to accomodate him
in the ODI team by adopting the 7+4 team composition.
We needed an extra batsman in the team, because 6 was not considered enough.
It doesn’t need the brains of a mathematical genius to find who was the odd one in.

With Dravid as an automatic choice in the team
an extra hard hitting batsman had to be found at the top of the order.
It was easy with the supersub rule, we had 5 bowlers and 7 batsmen if need be.

But not for long, it was back to XI playing in a team.
Pathan got promoted to the top in the batting order to compensate…cover up.
And was eventually sacrificed in the process, he forgot his main attribute, to bowl.

What other reason was there to go into the WCC with 7 batsmen?
And even when we did, we failed to score like a team with 7 batsmen.
We did not lose for the lack of a bowler, we lost because we lacked in ODI batting.

The farcical tour of Bangladesh is at last over.
The team is not back in track, they weren’t even tested.
It is time for a serious rethink for the Indian selectors and management.
We have had a glimpse of the behind the scene lobbying, and I don’t like it.

Like a round peg in a square hole,
there will always be a place for him in the team.
But he will wobble and will need extra wedges to keep him in.
When the crunch comes, its bound to fall down like a house of cards. And it did.

Mr Dravid, what is more important to you?
Success of Team India? or your multiple endorsements?