Sidin says Dravid was our Hurricane man in one day matches compared to the spitfire of rest of the team!
Rahul Dravid leaves the field. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images
EVERY LOSER WINS
It's one of sport's more lamentable clichés. "Yeah it's true I've just scored 502 not out, cured baldness and had a night of unprecedented feral fun with the my chosen one, but I'd swap it all for a team victory." We shouldn't blame sportsmen for uttering this nonsense – society has become so nuance-averse and addicted to fabricated anger that the players court unjust opprobrium if they say anything different. Yet it was refreshing to hear the wonderful Rahul Dravid ignore all those distractions and assert calmly that his performances this summer have given him a "degree of personal satisfaction", even if India's defeat left him with "mixed feelings".
Dravid has always been one of the most admirable men in sport yet, almost impossibly, over the last few weeks he has made us admire him more than ever before. He batted with immense pride and dignity to make three centuries, two of them as a stand-in opener, a role he has never enjoyed. Dravid was both kingpin and handyman. He filled in not just as opener but also as wicketkeeper when MS Dhoni bowled at Lord's; he also defused any lingering controversy over the Ian Bell incident at Trent Bridge with an honest and perfectly judged interview at the close of play. You wouldn't be surprised to hear he also fixed a leak in the dressing-room and drove the team coach back to the hotel one night.
To see one of the great players so willing to get hands dirty, and still perform with his usual pristine excellence, was a joy. For all England's extraordinary excellence, some will always associate this summer with Gentleman Rahul, an immaculate human being who is part 1940s film star, part modern man; a good man, and thorough.
The fact Dravid made his runs while India were whitewashed will mean a devaluation in some quarters. The question of runs made in a losing cause has always vexed those who spend half their day leering at cricket statistics. It is preferable to make runs in a victory, such is cricket's fusion of individual and team sports, yet it is absurd to dismiss runs made in a losing cause. It's so much more complicated than that. To take an extreme example, Ian Bell hit 162 not out in a win over Bangladesh in 2005 and a four-hour 87 in defeat against Australia at Perth in 2006-07. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know which was the superior innings, or what should have given him more satisfaction.
Instead of looking at winning and losing runs, we should instead focus on tough and easy runs. Dravid has always specialised in the former. It is certainly not fair to bracket all losing runs together. Some are worthier than others, and few are as worthy as those made while you are along on the burning deck. The banner at The Oval – "England v The Wall" – was pretty apt. In this series Dravid batted for 1,476 minutes, almost twice the next best (Sachin Tendulkar's 745). He made 461 runs at an average of 76.83, which accounted for 23% of India's runs. In the tone-setting first innings, he made 388 runs at an average of 184, and 35% of India's runs. The record belongs to Brian Lara, who made a staggering 42% of West Indies' runs in Sri Lanka in 2001-02; West Indies were thrashed 3-0, yet Lara scored 688 runs in those three Tests, first muzzling and then mastering Murali.
West Indies were so abject for much of Lara's career that he made 5,316 in Test defeats – over a thousand more than the next highest, his erstwhile colleague Shiv Chanderpaul. Some people feel this statistic compromises Lara's genius; if anything, it embellishes it. So many of Lara's runs were made when he was completely alone. This is also why Dravid's best hundred of the series was arguably his last. During the first two he had a legitimate expectation that his runs might win the match and the series. At The Oval, however, the series was gone, and it very quickly became apparent that India were going to lose the match regardless of what Dravid did. While human beings are intrinsically selfish, that selfishness is often, paradoxical as it sounds, supported by external concerns – whether it's doing it for the team, your family, your boss, whoever. We should not confuse selfishness with self-worth; doing it only for yourself can be the scariest and hardest thing of all.
Dravid had all the excuses he needed to fail. It would have been natural to allow the tiredness to take hold, yet he somehow managed to achieve and maintain the higher state of concentration necessary to resist the Chinese Water Torture of England's bowling. Given the innate precariousness of batting – one false move and you're history – and the fact that the nature of Dravid's game meant he could not play with the freedom of the damned, it was a staggering achievement. And one that, whatever the book of clichés tell you, he should remember with pride for the rest of his days.
