Dravid, batting Goliath of the World Cup

At the end of a failed campaign, most good managers conduct a dispassionate post-mortem. Dispassionate' is the key word because post-mor...

At the end of a failed campaign, most good managers conduct a dispassionate post-mortem. Dispassionate’ is the key word because post-mortems can easily turn into witch-hunts and that is the last thing Indian cricket needs. It is easy to cut off heads but that is a cosmetic change for unless you cleanse from within another one will pop up.

The other problem with post-mortems is that they tend to focus on the negatives and gloss over all that might have been gained on a tour. And so while there were lots of negatives (fielding, bowling at the death and other such familiar enemies) which need to be looked at (by the way, whose job is that? I don’t know. Does anybody?), there were some startling advances as well.

The most dramatic of those to my mind was the emergence of Rahul Dravid as a top one-day batsman. Twelve months ago, his confidence shattered by insensitive selectors, he was struggling to get the ball off the square against Kenya and Bangladesh. He kept saying he could play one-day cricket and veryfew people listened to him. Sometimes class is not as visible as it seems !

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Luckily for Indian cricket, Dravid has a lovely head on his shoulders, is a very confident young man, makes good friends and has a very solid family to back him. When you are down, it is not just your cricketing ability that brings you back up. It is non-quantifiable qualities like loyalty, trust and faith that keep you going, that guide you and reassure you that you are on the right path. Dravid was lucky for he had the right people around him otherwise I believe he might have suffered in Test matches as well.

Here in England we saw the complete one-day batsman. We saw the classical player who finds the gaps in the early overs and therefore does not need to slog. But we knew that all along. What was revealing was to see the occasional lofted shot, even the odd hit across the line and quite dramatically, the jab played with soft hands to ensure that the ball does not hurry to the fielder and leaves enough time for the single.These are qualities that come out of confidence and a desire to learn.

When a player is struggling and believes he has a point to prove, he invariably hits the ball hard. Dravid did that twelve months ago but since his return from New Zealand, armed with the confidence that his place was his alone, his progress has been startling. Early on this campaign he told me that a top order batsman should have the confidence to let twenty balls go through if they cannot be scored off because he should back himself to make up for those. On this tour, Dravid was backing himself and it showed, though I don’t remember him having to let twenty balls go through early on!I think Dravid was the best batsman of the World Cup. India actually had quite a few in the honours list with Ganguly, Jadeja and Tendulkar as well. And yet, India finished sixth out of nine ! To me, it says that matches can be won by batting alone on the flat pitches of the sub-continent but that in more demanding conditions, you need a couple of otherarrows. Our bowling arrow was a bit wayward and our fielding arrow was lame.

But I am willing to wager, and I will be delighted if I am wrong, that in March 2003 when our team returns from South Africa, we will be saying the same things.

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You see, post-mortems need to happen in administrations as well. That scorecard is looking a bit bleak.