Being there

He likes to bat. Rahul Dravid spent more than 30 hours at the crease during the four Test matches against England this summer, and when asked during the Oval Test what motivated him, he said it was the desire to "bat as long as I can for the team". Pay close attention to those words. Not make as many runs as possible, but "bat as long as I can".

Occupation of the crease. Common sense would indicate that it has value mainly as the means to an end. One has to occupy the crease to make runs, and for players like Sachin Tendulkar or Viv Richards, it is merely a hygiene factor to their primary aim of dominating the bowling. Occupation becomes an end in itself only when circumstance dictates it, like when a team with no chance of winning needs to survive the fifth day of a Test match.

Nationality can be one such circumstance. India, for most of their history, have been a weak team. In a Test-match context, they have been so for all the time Dravid has played for them, as manifest in their failure to win a Test series abroad. The reason for India's weakness is twofold. One, their bowlers have rarely been good enough to take the 20 wickets needed to win a game. And two, their batsmen get out. Simply put, they cannot occupy the crease for long enough.

It is this context that players like Dravid and, in an earlier generation, Sunil Gavaskar, become so important to their team. They embody, to a highly evolved degree, the one characteristic that their team lacks so abjectly. Their batsmanship revolves around occupying the crease, and by doing this, they occupy a void in their team's cricket.

It is ironic that Sachin Tendulkar is India's biggest superstar. Tendulkar's game, due to a quirk of destiny, belongs more to Australia than it does to India. He is a genius, a strokeplayer who can destroy attacks, in a team which needs someone who can occupy the crease more than someone who can dominate bowlers; which values duration over speed. It is often commented of Tendulkar that many of his hundreds don't come when his team needs them most. That is an unfair criticism.

Tendulkar's essence - his devastating strokeplay - is not in sync with India's primary need, and that is not his fault. If anything, Tendulkar over-compensates sometimes by curbing his natural instincts, and his batting suffers for it. If Tendulkar played for Australia, he would be a freer strokeplayer, not constrained by circumstance and expectation. He would be their biggest matchwinner. Dravid, on the other hand, would perhaps not be as valuable to Australia.

If one looks at India's greatest moments of need in the recent past, Dravid has been the man who has stepped up in most of them. Tendulkar made a brilliant counter-attacking century when India was 68 for 4 in the first Test at Bloemfontein against South Africa in 2001, a masterpiece of improvisation that only he could have played, but India still lost by over a day. Dravid, whether at Kolkata or Port Elizabeth or Georgetown or Trent Bridge (see following pages), came in when the need of the hour was occupation, and he performed in all those crunch situations.

If one looks back into cricketing history and thinks of players who have played similar roles, the names of Gavaskar and Leonard Hutton come to mind. Those names are not taken lightly. Both of them bore heavy burdens, made occupation of the crease a mission, blended technical proficiency with great powers of concentration and application. That description matches Dravid, and his record shows it. His career average stands at a superb 54.43, his overseas average at 59.13. And in the last two years, when he's really bloomed, he's made 2514 runs in 27 Tests at 66.15 per innings.

Both Gavaskar and Hutton, like Dravid, were immaculate technicians. And both got stereotyped as drab and boring batsmen, a characterisation that wasn't quite accurate. Hutton was an attractive strokeplayer in his early years but curtailed himself because his team needed stability at the top. Ditto Gavaskar - when you see the man commenting on TV about shot-selection, you see a master preaching what he practised. When he played freely, as while making his 29th Test hundred against West Indies in Delhi in 1983-84, against their fearsome quartet, he could tear any attack apart.

Dravid is in the same mould. He may play from the textbook, but that textbook has a lot more than just dreary defence in it. Dravid is a complete strokeplayer not just because he can play all the classical strokes so well, but because he plays them as they should be played in every aspect. When he executes a pull, his footwork, his pivot, his balance, his arm-positions, the way his wrists roll so emphatically to keep the ball down, form the epitome of the shot. His straight-drives, cover-drives, cuts are similarly models of technical perfection, from back-lift to transfer of weight to follow-through.

Tendulkar is the master of timing - when he straight-drives, for example, his heavy bat often meets the ball like a wall at just the precise micro-second and sends it hurtling past the bowler to the boundary with so little follow-through that purists wouldn't even call it a drive. That's a mark of his genius, of course; a term that can also be used for VVS Laxman - his wristy elegance elicits sighs of awe and in almost the same breath his static feet can induce moans of despair. Take nothing away from these two men, but it is Dravid who embodies cricket in all its classical beauty. His correctness makes him solid and dependable; his mastery of the fundamentals can often make him a glorious strokeplayer to watch. More than just The Wall, as the cliché goes, he can also be high art.

If Dravid the workman is more on view than Dravid the artist, it is because his team needs the stodge more than the beauty. Dravid is central to the welfare of the team; the team is also central to his psyche, and that makes it a perfect fit. When asked recently which the happiest moments of his life were, he cited the Kolkata Test against Australia, and the NatWest Trophy finals in July 2002. In one he played a key but supporting role; in the other he himself had an undistinguished outing. But they were high points for India and, by extension, for himself - an indication of what a perfect team-man he is. At 29, as he enters what promises to be a phase in his career that will place him among the all-time greats, one can safely assume that when India needs him most, he will be there.