Congrats Rahul Dravid! Lords 100!

[pinkfreud]

My absolute favourite cricketer of all time :) Such a wonderful, class player, a true example of how test cricket should be played. So glad he finally got his century at such a crucial stage of the match. Hats off to him. Let's hope he and VVS stay put today and save us yet again :two_thumbs_up:

[achilles]

Yep in the old school of Test Cricket...Recently it is the players who stay and score both. Again I am not expecting upwards of 80% but around 60% would have immensly helped. Not taking anything away from Dravid's great knock, but it makes difference. Another thing is scoring keeps pressure on the fielding side as well as pressure off batting partner.The best example is that of Vengsarker and Miandad,they would score at healthy rate without Sehwag type hitting...still in an era were 50% SR was acceptable.

I think there is a difference between Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid and Harbhajan Singh. They all bat according to their strengths. Just like there is simply 1 Virender Sehwag or Sehwag-like cricketer in the world, there is simply 1 player who can bat for hours endlessly, in difficult conditions and save a game for us. Dravid was saving us an embarrassment in the first inngs by playing out the opposition. Everyone likes fancy stroke-play. Heck, even the crowd was cheering Praveen Kumar for his bang-bang batting in the 1st inng. But what gave him the license to go bonkers.... a certain Rahul Dravid at the other end. For every Sehwag, there must be a Dravid.

[pinkfreud]

For every Sehwag' date=' there must be a Dravid.[/quote'] :agree:

[singhprakash72]

Are you saying Vengsarkar was a better test player than Dravid? Dravid's strength is that he doesn't lose concentration for long periods of time. Yes, his SR is a tad slow, but he more than makes up for it by making his innings count by not throwing away his wicket after eating all those balls.

Nope...you are missing the point, it is about batting style...you don't have to be dasher. Dravid can bat easily around 60% SR , but gets bogged down and puts pressure on his partner very easily. It is simple if we had 3 more dravids then this side would have been unbeatable, but if remaining batsman don't stay on the other end...eventually your SR will cost runs to India....like here in Lords.

[yoda]

Nope...you are missing the point, it is about batting style...you don't have to be dasher. Dravid can bat easily around 60% SR , but gets bogged down and puts pressure on his partner very easily. It is simple if we had 3 more dravids then this side would have been unbeatable, but if remaining batsman don't stay on the other end...eventually your SR will cost runs to India....like here in Lords.

There is no denying that if a player like Dravid tries to up the ante, he has to do it at the cost of playing some strokes which in itself exposes him to getting out early. This obviously is not the case of a guy like Sehwag or SRT for whom the opposite happens. They get out if they try getting too defensive. I don't think Dravid's SR is costing us anything here. If anything, we needed him to stay around in the 2nd innings longer at whatever SR he could have managed.

[singhprakash72]

LOL at the dude talkin about Strike rate in the shiithole we were he was our Superman and now ppl pointing fingers... god damnit stick to gay circus and odis... dont ***in watch tests dumb***s

No ...you are stuck in 80s and 90s of test cricket. Last 10 years, how many teams have won test matches by having played out innings with <40% SR. Now let me guess my dum***** friend which team won most test matches in last decade hmm....Aussie because they played at low strike rate???Dravid is valuable no doubt, but his ininngs can be match winner if he finds other partner who can stick with him like VVS,SRT ...but if he runs out of partner, his SR goes against team total. I don't give a rats back about IPL or 20/20 circus...but Test cricket is playing to the situation and sometime low strike rate works but in most instances a healthy runrate drives team success.