Rahul Dravid: The underrated legend in ODIs

On one hand, he is referred to as the unsung hero, the silent guardian, a watchful protector, the Dark Knight of Indian cricket... lurking in the shadows guarding the susceptibilities. If Sachin Tendulkar was the Superman of Indian cricket, Rahul Dravid indeed was the Dark Knight.

But, I’d rather call him the underrated legend. Though his contributions in Test cricket are widely acknowledged by one and all, he is far underrated in limited-overs cricket and that’s what we’re concerned with, and that’s where a lot of cricket pundits undermine his efforts.

Always overshadowed by his teammates like Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, had Dravid played for any other team, he’d have been their “Superman”, but again, there can only be one sword in a sheath, one king in a kingdom, and likewise, one best player in a team and India had the world’s best in Tendulkar.

Let us turn some pages of history and peak into statistics and dissect them to analyse his ODI career to find out how good or bad he was in limited-overs cricket.

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He was a better ODI batsman the what the cricket fans perceived

Any cricket fan should know that Dravid is 9th in the list of highest run scorers in ODI cricket, and was only the 6th cricketer to do so, and that is no mean feat. He scored 83 half centuries, only Tendulkar (95), Sangakkara (93) and Kallis (84) have scored more and that's when he is 7th on the list of batsmen to have played most number of ODI matches; and to add to that, 55 of them came for a winning cause!

His batting average is pretty much comparable to other great players like Brian Lara, Ricky Ponting, Inzamam, Sangakkara or Ganguly.

But the general perception is that the runs he scored came at the cost of the team’s run rate, which is an erroneous allegation. His strike rate, though on a lower side is still pretty much comparable to the great players of his time. Even Sangakkara and Jayawardene scored at a similar strike rate until recent times, when due to the advent of T20 cricket, scoring runs at a brisk rate became more of a necessity than a bliss.

The difference between Dravid’s strike rate or Kallis’s and Ganguly’s is but minor. The bottom-line is, they all played at the same rate, it’s just that Dravid wouldn’t play those big shots to entertain the crowd like Ganguly would, he’d rather put his head down and get on with his job of scoring runs.

Again, it must be pointed out that Dravid was also capable of hitting those big shots, as he did in his only T20 International outing, or during his IPL career, which was more successful than some other cricketers of his time, like Ganguly or Ponting. He has the record of second fastest ODI fifty by an Indian, he just took 22 balls!

Even someone like Kumar Sangakkara who played a lot of cricket in the T20-era scored with a strike rate of 78.

His variable batting positions made him more versatile

Dravid was the leading run-getter in the 1999 World Cup

What makes Dravid so special as an ODI player is his versatility. Scoring those many runs is a herculean task as it is, but the circumstances under which he scored them makes it stupendous. Till now we have only talked about the numbers game and not the way they came. Dravid by nature was a top order batsman, who’d rather prefer playing a long steady innings than having a short-burst lower down the order.

But that’s what we saw him doing so often. 86 times in 318 innings Dravid batted at number 5 or lower, Tendulkar just 41 in 452 and Ganguly did that just 12 times in 300 innings. At number 4, Dravid batted 102 times, Tendulkar 61 and Ganguly 20 times.

Playing at 5 or 6, Tendulkar scored 945 runs at an average of 30.48 while Ganguly averaged 24.84, 26.29 and 7.50 at 4, 5 and 6, But Dravid amassed 3,301 and 2,459 runs at an average of 36.27 and 43.91 at 4 and 5 respectively.

At no.4, Tendulkar and Dravid are neck and neck, with Tendulkar averaging 2 runs more per innings while Dravid scoring thousand runs more than Tendulkar did at that position.

He was the leading run-scorer in the '99 WC, amassing 461 runs in 8 innings at a strike rate of 85.52, and still it was Lance Klusener and not him who won the player of the series award that tournament. He rarely got the opportunity to play freely at the top, and even when he was the captain, he preferred dealing with the tougher task.

His career in the IPL further proves his versatility as a batsman, he was almost as successful as Tendulkar and overshadowed Ganguly by a country mile. Dravid’s overall stats may not look as good as Ganguly’s or Tendulkar’s, but, taking no credit away from them, Dravid was more versatile than the other two legends.

A wolf who lived for the pack

Dravid even donned the gloves for the Indian team when they needed it

Dravid was always the captain’s go-to-man. Need a wicket-keeper-batsman? Bank on Dravid. Need an opener? Dravid to rescue. Stability down the order? Dravid's there! You could always bank on Dravid. Harsha Bhogle once called Dravid, “A wolf who lives for the pack”, rightly so...

The fact that Dravid never took the world by storm, is the reason why he never got the stardom he deserved. Hadn’t it been for his contributions as a Test cricketer, he would have faded in the winds as just another cricketer. He was often considered suitable for playing the second fiddle, his record partnerships with Tendulkar and Ganguly makes this claim evident enough.

Maybe his initial struggle in the format contributed to the assumption that he was only suited to Test cricket. As they say, “The first impression is the last impression”, and that judgement prevails over his later success, because for almost seven years, from 1999 to 2006 he was one of the most successful ODI cricketers in the world, and yet some say, he was a mediocre limited overs batsman.

Perhaps, he was never as gifted an athlete as Tendulkar was, he never had the flamboyance of Brian Lara; but his sheer determination, grit and impeccable work ethic made him into what he was, and that was his true gift.