Dhoni led by example, not rhetoric - Dravid Starting with the tour of England in 2011, Dhoni won only one Test match overseas. Dravid sympathised with Dhoni for perhaps not having the resources - particularly in the bowling department - to improve his away record. If you look at it overall, there was no doubt he was Indias most successful Test captain. The numbers dont lie, Dravid said. Theres no doubt that he didnt have the best of times, especially over the last four years, in overseas conditions. Maybe its also a reflection of the fact that the team was in transition, it was changing times, especially in the bowling department. Its not easy to captain a team when you dont have the resources to be able to take 20 wickets. Dhoni also attracted criticism for his defensive tactics as captain, and Dravid said those measures might have been forced on him by the resources at his disposal. He was never defensive when captaining in India, Dravid said. When he had spinners, he was always attacking, on turning tracks, he was willing to force the game. Its just overseas, and over the last three or four years, that I just think he maybe felt he didnt have the bowling resources to be able to take 20 wickets, and he found himself, at many stages, always behind the four-ball. Its hard to attack for the sake of attacking when your runs are leaking at four, four-and-a-half an over, when your batsmen - as it happened on the two tours I played at the end of my career in England and Australia - are struggling as well. We just didnt put enough runs on the board for a captain to be aggressive and attacking enough. Yes, he would be a bit disappointed that he could not maybe transition the team as well as he would have liked overseas over the last four years, and maybe he felt it was the right time for someone like Virat Kohli to take that forward and possibly he felt hed taken Indian cricket as far as he possibly could as a Test captain. Dhoni suffered from a perception that he didnt take Test cricket as seriously as he did the shorter forms of the game, but Dravid dismissed the theory. You cannot play 90 Test matches by not embracing Test cricket and not wanting to work hard at it and make a career out of it, Dravid said. Its another matter that his one-day record and his T20 record are much better than his Test record, and his achievements in one-day cricket and T20 cricket are phenomenal. Thats not to say he did not have a good record as a Test cricketer as well. Sure, if you judge him by the standards of an Adam Gilchrist, then yes, maybe his Test record wasnt that good, but purely if you judge him by the standards of Indian wicketkeeper-batsmen and forget everything else - playing lower down the order, playing 90 Test matches, most dismissals for India, most runs as a wicketkeeper-batsman for India, most centuries - its a phenomenal record as a Test cricketer and something he can be very proud of.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 03:00:33 +0000
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