Post by RickSanchez on Mar 14, 2017 18:52:26 GMT
It is laughable that the majority of cricket writers, especially in India, stumble all the time trying to find Dravid’s place in Indian cricket. The classic cop-outs – ‘one of the greatest’, ‘among the best’ consistently showcase their own lack of imagination and the sheer inability of conventional cricket analysis to provide a precise picture. It is still considered blasphemous to put him over Tendulkar, over even Gavaskar. The obvious fact however is that Rahul Dravid has been India’s greatest batsman, and greatest Test cricketer, for a long time now, probably since 2004. It is so painfully obvious that it defies belief that this truth is so vainly resisted.
Past the conventional and embarrassingly outdated statistical analysis in the sport even now (where he is hailed as the second-highest Test run-scorer of all-time and not much else), past the romantic coverage of the game that continues to value spectacle more than character (which still flinches from identifying his true place in cricket history), past the excitable media reports and even the less rabid expert views (which are simply unable to process the cumulative impact of what he has done), past the chauvinistic fan frenzy (which deifies less deserving figures for reasons that don’t have all to do with sport) – in a space of his own, stands not just India’s greatest cricketer but the sport’s biggest series-defining batsman.
The most important contribution a cricketer can make is not steering the course of an innings or affecting the result of the match but defining the outcome of a series (or a tournament). For it is those performances that really change that team’s place in contemporary history – they constitute the real step forward or backward. This is the real legacy of a sportsman in a team sport, which people often forget cricket is. This is the big picture.
One of the great anomalies in cricket is that those performances have never ever been accounted for, or measured formally. It is inexplicable because this is largely not a subjective exercise at all but something very easily identifiable.
This measure is one of the main pillars of the Impact Index system. And it is on this count that Rahul Dravid makes his real mark. His count of 8 series-defining performances in Test cricket is not just the highest for any Indian Test cricketer, it is the joint-highest (alongwith Inzamam-ul-Haq) by any batsman in all of Test cricket history. This is what makes Rahul Dravid such a giant even in international cricket.
Past the conventional and embarrassingly outdated statistical analysis in the sport even now (where he is hailed as the second-highest Test run-scorer of all-time and not much else), past the romantic coverage of the game that continues to value spectacle more than character (which still flinches from identifying his true place in cricket history), past the excitable media reports and even the less rabid expert views (which are simply unable to process the cumulative impact of what he has done), past the chauvinistic fan frenzy (which deifies less deserving figures for reasons that don’t have all to do with sport) – in a space of his own, stands not just India’s greatest cricketer but the sport’s biggest series-defining batsman.
The most important contribution a cricketer can make is not steering the course of an innings or affecting the result of the match but defining the outcome of a series (or a tournament). For it is those performances that really change that team’s place in contemporary history – they constitute the real step forward or backward. This is the real legacy of a sportsman in a team sport, which people often forget cricket is. This is the big picture.
One of the great anomalies in cricket is that those performances have never ever been accounted for, or measured formally. It is inexplicable because this is largely not a subjective exercise at all but something very easily identifiable.
This measure is one of the main pillars of the Impact Index system. And it is on this count that Rahul Dravid makes his real mark. His count of 8 series-defining performances in Test cricket is not just the highest for any Indian Test cricketer, it is the joint-highest (alongwith Inzamam-ul-Haq) by any batsman in all of Test cricket history. This is what makes Rahul Dravid such a giant even in international cricket.
