Land Rover ploughs on as Jagaur zooms |
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Sunday March 30, 01:03 AM
Chennai, March 30: If in his sporty, spiffy flamboyance Sehwag can be regarded as the Jaguar of Indian batting, then Rahul Dravid is very much the Land Rover, the rock steady, practical machine that represents solid values and is capable of enduring the roughest terrain. However, it is inevitably the sports car that in the cynosure as it zips along leaving others in its trail.
As long as Sehwag was zipping along on a personal freeway that seemed to be free of any obstructions, the first cricket Test was spectacular. Everything else seemed an anti-climax, although plenty of history was there to be recorded on a day on which Sehwag sank his own Indian record of the highest Test score off the very first ball of day four and Dravid took his place in the exclusive club among champion performers with 10,000-plus runs in their kitty.
There is a piece of statistics that places the two Chepauk centurions in perspective. While Dravid took 272 balls to get 100, Sehwag needed just six more balls to get to 300. Dravid may have no complaints about being outpaced like that as he had strategically resigned himself to be the passive accompanist.
It would have been folly to compete with a batsman who seemed to have two strokes for every ball while others could barely manage the intended one.
Where Dravid stood tall was in comprehending very early that huge team totals are not made simply on the contribution, however brilliant, of one batsman. India’s ambitions towards building a useful lead could be realised to a great extent because Dravid carried on in his sedate run-gathering style that has marked the best part of his 120-Test career in which he has made 25 Test centuries.
Incidentally, Dravid is in the more exclusive club of batsmen who have done the 10,000 double in Tests and ODIs, sharing the honour now with Brian Lara and Sachin Tendulkar.
For a batsman first considered a misfit in the shorter version, David had made himself more than just a useful contributor by the same assiduous methods of studying and analysing the challenge before taking it on.
How much the landmark meant to him was made apparent in the fact that on getting to it Dravid pointed his bat first at the TNCA President’s box where his parents and his wife and young son were seated. Runs have always defined his career, which is what he makes very clear at a point in his career where family takes precedence.
So committed is he to this matter of making runs whenever an opportunity presents itself that on recovering from the finger injury sustained in Australia he played the Deodhar Trophy and made a century and a half century while the young lions of the tri-series managed very little.
Dravid, Laxman and Ganguly — all of whom batted after Sachin Tendulkar, the star of the tri-series finals — fell without scoring and may never again get the ODI call. They may nurse a grievance in this regard and yet they are the keenest when it comes to playing the limited-overs stuff, not so much to widen the so-called senior-junior rift in Indian cricket as to prove a selection point much like Sehwag said how he derived his motivation for compiling his epic hand of 319.
The Indian scorecard did not show too much substance beyond the first three names in the order but then that was owed to the bowlers proving that there is no such thing as a dead wicket because even the Rip van Winkles of Test wickets tend to wake up when there has been sufficient wear and tear. Steyn’s fullish length and a bit of reverse swing even with the reluctant SG ball were the weapons that struck a few blows for the beleaguered men called bowlers.
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