I wouldn’t have survived in ODIs now with my strike-rate: Dravid
Rahul Dravid, the quintessential ‘Wall’ of Indian cricket, had an honest confession to make about how the art of batsmanship has changed over a period of time since he retired from the sport.
‘‘I wouldn’t have survived today if I batted the way I did in my days (in the One Day Internationals). Look at the strike-rates today,’’ said the former Indian captain, whose record boasts of 10,899 runs from over 300 ODIs and a decent run later in T20 format in IPL as well.
Defending his so-called patient style of batsmanship at a videocast with cricketer-turned-commentator Sanjay Manjrekar, Dravid said: “I saw that as my job and took great pride in it and I tried to do that in the best possible way. That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to bat like Virendra Sehwag and hit those shots but may be my talent was different — determination and concentration and I worked on that.
“While my strike rate in ODI cricket weren’t up to the level of Sachin’s or Viru’s but that’s the level that we played at back then. Obviously I can’t compare myself to Kohli or Rohit Sharma because they have blown the ODI paradigm to an all new level. But to be fair I grew up wanting to be a Test player.”
Commenting on the pressure faced by today’s cricketers in the T20 format vis-a-vis the pressure in a Test match, Dravid said: “If you were to talk about the stress levels or pressure of a particular moment, then yes it’s a lot more in T20 format. To get there and hit sixes from ball one, requires practice and skill.
“But if you’re talking about pressure as a whole, the fact is that you have to play for five days in a Test Match. And I think that is pressure. There is no running away from that. In any other format you can get away, but in a Test match you go out and bat, then you watch your team bat then you watch the opposition bat and you have a lot of time to think. So I think pressure in a Test match is at a different level.”
Dravid believes that all formats of the game require different skill sets and one has to value what some of the cricketers do at the T20 level. “The only difference between T20 cricket and Test cricket is that in T20 format you can get away with a lot more. But if you have glaring weaknesses, you cannot survive in Test cricket.”