Cricket: Goodbye Mr. Dravid

Millions of words have been written about Rahul Dravid in the last few days after he announced his retirement from Test and First Class cricket. Accolades are pouring in on this gentleman player who is undoubtedly one of the greatest batsmen in world cricket history. The man has scored over 13,000 runs in Tests, more than 10,000 runs in the one day mode, and taken a record breaking 210 Test catches. His stature in the game is equal to or higher than that of Don Bradman.

Have the officials and the media been fair to this man who was a unique ambassador for the game and India? I would say no. Please see my posts  ‘Cricket: Board games and bucks – Rahul Dravid out!’ (September 16, 2007), and Cricket: Rahul Dravid’s ‘colonel’ bogey (November 2, 2007). An armchair critic once wrote that Rahul had to take up wicket keeping because his batting was not good enough to assure him a place in the Indian team. The rumours were that a powerful lobby was behind the ‘pull down Dravid’ campaign.

But they too knew what a great player the man was. The compliments paid to him verbally and in writing after he announced his retirement are genuine. And the tributes came from them all – officials, media, team-mates, players from other countries, and the public.

Why did Rahul Dravid retire at this point of time? Easy answer is his failure on the recent Australian tour. That is not correct, as the former India Captain himself has said. He can bounce back for more batting achievements. I feel, strange as it might sound, he decided to hang up his boots because of the three or four catches he dropped in the recent matches. That indicated the aging

Well Dravid, adios. You will always be a hero to millions. And, we still look forward to you playing in the IPL.

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Note: The photo is of ‘Rahul Dravid at the Bangalore test (7-Oct-2004) of the Australia v/s India series (Sep-Nov,2004). Picture taken by Geetanjali Chitnis and uploaded to Flickr under BY-SA license. Source URL: http://flickr.com/photos/geetanjali/475288920/’

Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Another Award for my blog

The Liebster Award has been presented to my blog by

Raji Muthukrishnan (http://rajirules.blogspot.in/). I am really honoured

and thrilled by this recognition. I thank my visitors who have brought up my blog to where it is today, Liebster (I believe

that in German the word means ‘Favourite) and

Raji Muthukrishnan.