Coach Rahul Dravid does not follow the ‘my way or the highway’ principle and it has worked for Team India | Cricket News

India had crashed out in group stages of the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean. Back home, things had turned dire. Sachin Tendulkar’s and Sourav Ganguly’s restaurants had been attacked, Zaheer Khan’s house stoned, a wall of MS Dhoni’s house broken. In the Caribbean, as India still had to spend a couple of days before their flight back home, most players secluded themselves. Virender Sehwag shut himself in his room, didn’t allow even the housekeeping staff to clean his room, and watched the TV show ‘Prison Break’ for endless hours.It’s then that Rahul Dravid approached youngsters Dhoni and Irfan Pathan. “Look, we are all upset. Chalo, let’s go for a movie.” The startled youngsters accompanied Dravid and were told, “Look, yes, we lost the World Cup. We all wanted to make a big difference. But this is not the end of it. Life is much bigger. We will come back tomorrow,” Pathan shared Dravid’s words that have stuck in his mind forever.

There was anger from cricket fans, especially directed at him for he was the captain and had taken the decision to push Sachin Tendulkar down to No.4 – but he wasn’t going into hiding. Days after he got back to India, while the World Cup was still on in the West Indies, Dravid took a two-day trip with his family to Kovalam beach in Kerala. A famous picture still pops up now on the internet. Bare- chested, clad in a long aqua-blue towel, Dravid can be seen near the water, oblivious to the people around.
He has always had this skill to switch off, to look at the big picture, to look at life in general, and yet be intense in his cricket bubble when he wants to be. His wife Vijeta once thought her husband was sleepwalking but realised he was shadow-batting in the middle of the night. “He doesn’t care for gadgets, and barely regers brands – of watches, cologne or cars,” she once wrote on Cricinfo. “But if the weight of his bat was off a gram, he would notice it in an instant and get the problem fixed.” She also talks about how at the same time he can switch off from the game, and be a “father and husband”.
It’s this ability to have a mental balance, a sangfroid, that he has attempted to infuse in the Indian team as a coach.
India’s captain Rohit Sharma and head coach Rahul Dravid during a practice session ahead of the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup match between India and Netherlands, at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, in Bengaluru, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023. (PTI)
On Wednesday, in a statement that was issued the BCCI when Dravid and the support staff’s contract was extended, the former Test No.3 said he was ‘genuinely proud of the culture’ in the dressing room.
“Together we have witnessed the highs and lows, and throughout this journey, the support and the camaraderie within the group have been phenomenal. It’s a culture that stands resilient, whether in moments of triumph or adversity,” Dravid said in the statement.
Except for the final, when Australia outthought and outplayed India, the team coached Dravid was the best at the tournament.

Luckily for Dravid, in Rohit Sharma, he has found a man who is different in many ways, but in essence believes in being “nice and balanced”, his oft-repeated term. He has had a few tactically-conservative decisions like preferring Shardul Thakur over Mohammad Shami, Axar Patel over Ravichandran Ashwin, and it seemed there was a sense of apprehension about plugging holes. From Dravid’s perspective, he wanted a long batting line-up. But once things fell in place, fortuitously with injuries to Hardik Pandya and Axar, he went with the flow and weaponised the team with solid choices.
As publicly thanked Rohit, Dravid has also backed the decision his captain to bat adventurously, and arranged the batting line-up in a particular fashion, clubbing a natural attacker with a solid risk-averse batsman. Rohit & Gill. Kohli & Shreyas. KL Rahul & Surya.
When he was captain, especially during the tumultuous time with Greg Chappell as coach, Dravid was at times criticised for letting the Australian run the show. Almost overshadowed the strong hovering-in-your-face presence of Chappell. Wondrously, he hasn’t repeated that during his stint as coach.
Then there was Rahul Dravid, a poster boy for intensity in his playing days, but who, as his coaching stint progressed, started to chill. He was wisecracking in media interactions, could be seen joking at the dug-outs, and backed his captain to the hilt. (Representational Image)
Mental guru Paddy Upton, who worked with Dhoni’s 2011 team and who has worked with Dravid at IPL franchise Rajasthan Royals, was roped in during last year’s T20 World Cup campaign. Upton explains how Indian cricket is witnessing a “new contemporary leadership that is not authoritarian, hierarchical and dictatorial” in nature. It’s no longer ‘my way or the highway’ principle. “Rahul genuinely is able to walk amongst the players as opposed to hovering above them,” Upton says.
Upton then hits on an important theme that many fans and critics have probably missed and got angsty on, especially during the early time of Dravid the coach.
“It normally takes 12 to 18 months for an impact of a leadership to really take root within a team and you are seeing that now. Rahul has come in just beyond 18 months and that’s what is happening now,” says Upton.
Process-oriented coach
It’s a theme that Dravid genuinely believes in. A year after he retired as a player, he would give a talk at India’s premier under-graduate educational institution Bits Pilani. It’s just a 12-minute speech, but one laced with humility, gratitude, grace, and insight.
He had spent five years slogging it out on the dust-bowls of domestic cricket, crisscrossing the country in trains, staying in shared accommodation, patiently waiting for the big prize of the India cap, but constantly working on his game.

This is how he put that wait in words: “You can take a Chinese bamboo seed and plant it in the ground, water and nurture that for an entire year, you will not see any sprout. In fact, you will not see a sprout for five years. But suddenly, a tiny shoot will spring from the ground. Over the next six weeks, the plant can grow as tall as 90 feet. It can grow as fast as 39 inches every 24 hours. You can literally watch the plant grow. What was the plant doing in those five years, seemingly dormant? It was growing its roots. For five full years, it was preparing itself for rapid massive growth. With its roots structure, the plant could not simply support itself for future growth.
“Some say that the plant grew 90 feet in six weeks. I would say it grew 90 feet in five years and six weeks.”
That in essence is Dravid’s character. He is deeply intimate with the fact that no success is overnight. He waters, nurtures and waits. With his reputation, he could have walked in as India coach, but went through the grind – U-19, India A, NCA, re-acquainted himself with the present-day cricketing system and players, before making himself available for the national team.
An episode from when he was the 2018 U-19 coach will be apt here. Just before the World Cup, Dravid had camped in Mumbai with 39 players who played competitive games within themselves. The games were spread across two venues, moving from the CCI downtown to suburban Bandra. Dravid would criss-cross manically between the games every day, but that’s not the story. Right at the end of the camp, as the players were waiting at the airport, he walked up to U Mukhilesh, an off-spinning allrounder.
Ahmedabad: Indian captain Rohit Sharma and Heach Coach Rahul Dravid after India lost the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 final to Australia, at the Narendra Modi Stadium, in Ahmedabad, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023. (PTI Photo/Gurinder Osan)
He was a cricketer who came into Dravid’s ambit just during that tournament and wasn’t going to make it to the final squad. Mukhilesh himself was surprised how much Dravid had noticed him in between shuttling around the city to catch both games. “In one of the games, I had got out playing a big shot after being involved in a decent partnership with Riyan Parag,” he says.
“Do you remember that shot you got out to in the second game? You were batting untroubled along with Parag, and if you had just continued batting that way, you would have got lots of runs. These are rare opportunities at this level; don’t regret later. The biggest thing is to learn from these makes. Off-spinning all-rounders have a good chance in India – your bowling is good, just ensure your batting talent doesn’t go to waste. Convert those kinds of chances in the future.”
Dravid cares. Or the time when Dravid told the team to work on life-skills. “Not just cricket, but use this period of life to learn about yourself – what makes you tick, what can make you a better person, what can make you ready to face the rest of life. Grow as a person.”

Motivation from father, joy of batting with captain @ImRo45 & @imVkohli and special bond with Head Coach ☺️ 👍
Man of the moment, @ShubmanGill, shares it all in this interview with Rahul Dravid 👌 👌 – @ameyatilak
Full feature 🔽 #TeamIndia | #INDvNZhttps://t.co/sAOk7VUGMk pic.twitter.com/z6kza58nB5
— BCCI (@BCCI) January 25, 2023
In that U-19 team, there was Shubman Gill too. Dravid would tease Gill recounting the father’s friendly dig to the player. Gill’s father would pull his son’s leg after he got out playing an aerial shot with: “Ho gaya chhakka, maar di lift-u?” and once in an innings when he slowed down considerably between 40 to 80, the father had quizzed him hard about the reason for slowness. That phone conversation reached Dravid, who then re-used it on a few occasions to remind Gill about what was expected of him.
Even the India players hear an updated version of this advice. No wonder Rohit was moved to say on the eve of the final that Dravid’s influence has been “massive”. “The way he stood with the players when we lost the T20 World Cup. The way he informed the players ‘this is what we are looking at’. For him, to give us the liberty to go play the way we wanted says a lot about him. What he has done for Indian cricket is massive, and he also wants to be part of this big occasion.”
When he retired, his wife would say that she thinks he will relax, read, learn to play the guitar – something he always wanted, and enjoy. A year after he retired, during that speech to the college kids, Dravid would say, “Like a good mountain climber, I am now in search of the next mountain to climb. The uncertainty makes me nervous – it also excites me. I am back to being like a little boy, lening to the cricket commentary coming from my transor in my father’s studio.”
It’s not clear if he has learnt to play that guitar yet, but he has been certainly strumming the Indian national team towards becoming the best it can be. Like that Chinese Bamboo.