Rahul Dravid: The man who flourished while playing second fiddle

Dravid was the batsman India always needed, but struggled to find until his arrival

Leonard Bernstein, the famed orchestra conductor, was once asked about the most difficult instrument there is to play. His reply was almost spontaneous: The Second Fiddle.

“I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm, that's a problem. And if we have no second fiddle, we have no harmony”.

Sherlock Holmes was always ‘the man’. Watson never was. Nobody ever sought him out actively, it was always Holmes. It must be difficult being there all the time and not being ‘the man’.

Holmes needed Watson more than Watson needed him. He was the sounding board behind Holmes, holding him steady; his method was the offset against Holmes’s madness. Without Watson, Holmes, for all his mental faculties, would probably have been a nameless, friendless drug addict. Without Watson, there would’ve been no harmony. There would’ve been no one to play the second fiddle.

The man who’s not ‘the man’ is fundamentally different from the man who’s ‘the man’. The man who’s ‘the man’ is a genius, endowed with talent, and has an inveterate flair for flamboyance.

Dravid was never ‘the man’. He never was. He never could’ve been. He was straight out of a textbook manual on batting: perfect, calm, restrained, constantly learning, and almost shy, a perfect recipe for a man who can never be ‘the man’. He couldn’t be ‘the man’.

But we always had ‘the man’. In fact, we had quite a few of them.

What India needed was a man who was not ‘the man’, or rather, was willing not to be one. India needed someone to play the second fiddle.

Dravid’s brand of cricket has always stood for something that one shouldn’t apply to Bollywood: look at the bigger picture. In Bollywood, the bigger the picture, the less you should look at it. Not in cricket though. The team is the bigger picture here.

The team, despite his world beating abilities, didn’t allow for him to be ‘the man’. The team wanted him to be at the vanguard, to block, to protect, to guard the others, who were more prolific, more outrageous, and posed greater threat to the opposition. The team wanted him not to be ‘the man’.

India had a lot of dangerous players, the ones who were vital in winning matches, at least according to the commentators. Whenever things got exciting in a match, the commentators would invariably talk about a Sehwag, a Tendulkar, or a Dhoni. These were world beating men who blasted opponents away. Dravid was never discussed.

Laxman flicked the Australians away casually through mid-wicket with a slight twitch of his wrists at Eden Gardens. Sehwag destroyed an attack that featured tormentors like Akhtar and Sami at Gaddafi. Tendulkar narrowly missed a double ton at Leeds, while Sourav came in and drove the English bowlers all over the park. The last time the English were driven so hard by Indians was in 1947.

Dravid was there in each of these occasions, and many more: blocking, guarding, leaving, and staying out there, while the others went about their business with abandon. He had his moment at Adelaide, but then, so did Laxman and Agarkar. He was never destined to be ‘the man’.

He was always a firefighter in a team of fire-eaters. He was important. Fans liked him. Fans loved Tendulkar.

He was probably none of the things that the others were. But he was a few other things. Most strikingly, he was a team player through and through. He was willing to do the dirty work. More importantly, India needed him to do the dirty work.

The team wanted him to do stuff that he didn’t particularly enjoy, like opening the innings, or keeping wickets. And just like it happens with terms and conditions after software installations, he accepted everything without hesitance.

He looked at them as challenges as well as opportunities to improve his skills, and strived to overcome them. Team, to him, came before everything else, and he was more than ready to inconvenience himself for the team’s cause. He could be asked for it because he was never ‘the man’.

He opened the batting. He kept wickets. He slogged when the team wanted, notwithstanding that it made him look like a ballerina stuck in a street dance face off.

There are other instances as well, like that appeal against Inzamam for obstructing the field at Peshawar, or declaring when Sachin was stuck at 194 in Multan. Dravid going forward with these decisions was like an Auto driver in Mumbai saying ‘yes’: highly unlikely, but it happened.

These were decisions that you couldn’t really place alongside what you’d normally associate with Dravid and his demeanour. Yet, somehow they were things that you’d probably associate only with Dravid: done with an unflinching belief that the team is paramount. Maybe the incidents showed him in bad light, but it didn’t matter. He was willing to be the bad guy. They had to be done for the bigger picture, for the greater good. Someone had to get his hands dirty. Someone had to bite the bullet.

Even the least remarkable Dravid outings were in themselves lessons in sacrifice for the greater good.

A hapless Indian side in Nagpur, barely able to stay afloat at 75/4 in reply to the Aussie first innings total of 398, was looking at Kaif and Dravid to see them through the day. The problem was that McGrath was in one of his moods. And when McGrath is in one of his moods, the best you can do is pray. Or cry.

Dravid struck a deal with Kaif according to which Kaif would face Warne while Dravid battled McGrath at the other end, a deal which effectively meant Kaif was insulated from one of the greatest spells of fast-bowling. Dravid blocked, left, fought, struggled, and almost saw McGrath off till he nicked one to the slips.

There was nothing remarkable about that innings: Dravid managed a 140 ball 21. One of those innings that might make you turn the television off.

Indians used to famously turn off their television sets once Sachin was dismissed. They probably switched off their televisions when Dravid batted as well, blocking and leaving till the cows came home. It didn’t matter though. It had to be done. The team wanted it done.

Even in his retirement he taught us a lesson in being a team player. There was no grandstanding, no farewell. A spate of bad scores, and he went away. Just like that, he was gone. Younger players needed time in the team, his time in the team. He had to go. He walked away.

On teamwork, Dravid famously quoted Kipling in Harsha Bhogle’s book: for the strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf.

Dravid’s philosophy, or rather Dravid as a philosophy, meant a lot of things: the importance of being upright, the need to persevere in order to make up for the lack of god’s gift, to be a gentleman on and off the field.

But somehow, the most striking part of Dravid as a philosophy is the willingness to put the team ahead of everything else, and the need to mould and sacrifice oneself for the greater good; to be willing to play the second fiddle, to be in the periphery but never actually in the limelight, willing to look bad as long as the team looked good, willing to be liked but not loved, willing to be the man who’s not ‘the man’.

Dravid: my main man.