Rahul Dravid retires from International cricket

[Karan114]

A true great of the game, and an absolutely thorough gentleman as well. Wish him well in retirement. Last few years were inconsistent for him but still an awesome batsman.

[rkt.india]

Rahul Dravid to retire tomorrow. But he also has 48 international 100s. Couldn't he wait till he completes 50 100s?

From Twitter.

[rkt.india]

You are not alone. :winky:

you too.:icflove:

[Marut]

If true, respect.

[ZodiaC]

Legend! Good decision IMO, would he play the home series vs kiwis though?

[Sidhoni]

:((

[Sean Bradley]

Good Decision, All good things come to an End, Time for VVS and Sachin to realise, Give Youngsters the Chance...As an Indian, its tough for us to let go good things, Take a leaf out of Rahul's book - I hope Sachin Follows Rahul to the Exit Door !

[SachDan]

About time. Although' date=' I have nothing against him. He had scored 3 centuries in England when the rest were ripped apart including the celeb seniors. Wonder when they will get the message.[/quote'] So you want Sachin to retire from tests too! yeah mate we know it's nothing personal :giggle:

[vvvslaxman]

Good Decision' date=' All good things come to an End, Time for VVS and Sachin to realise, Give Youngsters the Chance...As an Indian, its tough for us to let go good things, Take a leaf out of Rahul's book - I hope Sachin Follows Rahul to the Exit Door ![/quote'] Sachin will definitely prefer a fairy tale ending. But chances are pretty slim. Even if he has an outstanding series at this point , it will be coming in a losing cause considering the state of current Indian side.

[master22]

Good decision.Dravid always went a extra mile for his team.Will miss him a lot,should have played one last match in india though.:((

[Shunya]

Thank you Dravid for the memories...you are a legend

[Sooda]

He had seen it coming a LONG LONG time ago' date=' maybe around 2002-03, when he pointed out in an interview that he didn't really like the nickname because when he loses form etc, the nickname is going to haunt him with the press going bonkers with puns and all.[/quote'] Yeah I remember that, he actually said something like- the press will be coming out with 'the wall is crumbling' headlines Anyway a gent and epic epic cricketer. I do hope he goes on to coach or administrate or something to serve cricket further in the future it will help Indian cricket no end

[Lord]

so its true:((was one of favourite players very close to Sachin n Kumble.sad way to go, also we need at no.3 now.wouldnt be ideal to put a newbie there.maybe open with Mukund n have GG at 3

[zaqw222222]

It might be the case that he says that next test series might be his last, deserves to have his last test match in India

[Swing_n_Speed]

I wanna see Dravid live once last time. Legend. For me the best player ever. Grew up watching him and have always been a huge fan

[Swing_n_Speed]

Sachin will definitely prefer a fairy tale ending. But chances are pretty slim. Even if he has an outstanding series at this point ' date=' it will be coming in a losing cause considering the state of current Indian side.[/quote'] So we think. One ton is all it takes. Everything else will be forgotten.

[Mariyam]

He won't play till his 100th 100?

[Crookbond]

Dravid likely to retire on Friday http://www.espncricinfo.com/india/content/current/story/556624.html

Rahul Dravid is likely to announce his retirement on Friday. Dravid, 39, has called a press conference in Bangalore that will also be attended by N Srinivasan, the BCCI president. Dravid is set to be the first of India's senior-most cricketers - including Sachin Tendulkar and VVS Laxman - to quit the game after a season of speculation surrounding their future. His decision follows a poor tour of Australia but he enjoyed a prolific run through 2011, scoring five centuries - including four in the Caribbean and England. However, he is set to captain Rajasthan Royals in the upcoming IPL season. This will bring the curtains down on a career that, since his 95 on debut at Lord's in 1996, established Dravid as one of the greatest players of his generation and among the most accomplished ever. He will finish with 13,288 Test runs - behind only Tendulkar - in 164 matches, with 36 hundreds at an average of 52.31. His ODI career, which effectively ended in 2008 with a brief reprisal in 2011, was scarcely less successful - it yielded more than 10,000 runs and 12 centuries. He also has 210 catches, a Test record, in addition to 196 catches in ODIs. Behind the statistics, he will be remembered as the consummate team player, moving around in the batting order to suit the team's requirements and keeping wickets when necessary - most strikingly in ODIs, when his double role gave the team balance on its way to the World Cup final in 2003. His remarkable fitness allowed him to play 93 consecutive Tests from his debut to December 2005. He will be remembered as one of the last classical Test match batsmen, renowned for his technique and a willingness to bat through difficult circumstances - and over prolonged periods - yet able to stroke the ball around when the mood struck him. He was the anchor of India's famous middle-order, keeping the innings together while the strokeplayers - Tendulkar, Laxman and Ganguly - played a more attacking role. He appeared to especially flourish in partnership with Laxman, never more so than in the Eden Gardens Test of 2001. His batting qualities and efforts were often overshadowed by the flair of his team-mates yet they were brought into sharp focus over the past year with India's Test team struggling through a period of transition. Dravid showed his class on the tour to England in 2011. In a series in which India were completely outplayed and none of their other batsmen scored more than 275 runs in the Tests, Dravid amassed 461, including three hundreds, two of them when opening the innings against a high-quality pace attack. However, that was followed by a poor series in Australia, which reopened the debate about his retirement. As a captain Dravid had mixed success; he led India in 25 Tests, winning eight and losing six. Under him India cemented a newly won reputation for being good travellers, winning Test series in Pakistan in 2003-04 - he captained in two out of three Tests - West Indies in 2006 and in England in 2007. Yet his captaincy coincided with Greg Chappell's controversial term as coach and Dravid was clearly uncomfortable with the role.

[mishra]

Who named him the Wall anyway? :secruity:

Reebok ad guys... http://www.rediff.com/sports/1998/aug/13c.htm

A hoarding has just come down in Bangalore. It used to stand at one of the city's key intersections, down at the end of Brigade Road where it meets Residency Road. It was strategically placed, and, especially at night, dramatic in its effects. Whether one drove down Brigade or Residency, one would light up the resolute face of Rahul Dravid, known in that space only as 'THE WALL!'. My guess is that the adman who thought up this nickname is old enough to be young Dravid's father -- possibly, even his grandfather. His idea of Indian batsmanship is, it seems, defined by Vijay Merchant and Vijay Hazare or, at the very least, by Dilip Sardesai and Sunil Gavaskar. K S Ranjitsinghji When our copywriter was a boy, India could never hope to win. But if they put their mind to it, they could escape with a draw. Tuk-tuk, block-block, all through the last three days of the match after following on in the first innings. Naturally, the cricketer most admired across the land was the one who played forward with a 'dead' defensive bat. Colonel C K Naidu 'It is in the matter of patience that the Indian cricketer will never be equal to the Englishman'. Thus wrote Lord Harris in 1921. The Indian cricketers he knew best were K S Ranjitsinhji, who never played a Christian stroke in his life, and Colonel C K Nayudu, a man whose style of batsmanship can only be described, in contemporary terms, as a cross between Shahid Afridi and Sanath Jayasurya. Nevertheless, for Harris to issue a prophecy so categorical was to invite disaster. For if one defines 'India' broadly, as a cultural type spreading across all the SAARC countries, then it must be said that it is especially in the matter of patience that the Indian batsman has come to excel all the others. Two or three statistics say it best. The slowest century in Test cricket was scored by Mudassar Nazar. He took 557 minutes to reach a ton against England at Lahore in 1977-'78. Two winters later, I saw Mudassar batting in an elevated fifth gear in Bangalore, when he took a mere six-and-a-half hours to arrive at three figures. Next to me in the stands then was a fellow with one eye on the game and one ear on All India Radio. By the time we got to lunch the expert commentator, Lala Amarnath, was referring to Pakistan's opening batsman as 'Nazar Mohammed'. One cannot blame the Lala, for he had once fielded through 515 minutes while a chap by that name (Mudassar's father, actually) scored 124 in a Test match. As it happens, Nazar Mohammed liked to take his risks off the field. While still a Test cricketer, he started an affair with the great singer and actress Nur Jehan. They were together in a hotel room one day when the lady's husband walked in with a shotgun. The opening batsman leapt out of the window, and out of Test cricket, his arm broken in multiple places. All that remained was to pass on the art of tuk-tuk to his son. The slowest double hundred in Test cricket is marked against the name of the Sri Lankan wicketkeeper-batsman Brendon Kuruppu. Hanif Mohammed The slowest triple hundred, indeed the longest innings in Test cricket, was also the work of a subcontinental batsman. In 1957-'58, Hanif Mohammed batted for 970 minutes to score 337 and save a Test at Bridgetown. It is said that early in his innings a Bajan boy watching the match from a palm tree lost his balance and fell down, head first. He was taken to the hospital with a bad case of concussion. When he came to, forty-eight hours later, the brat's first word were, ''Is Hanif still batting?'' He was! Like Nazar Mohammed, when Hanif finally retired he took in hand the cricketing education of his son. Thirty years after that Barbados marathon, his boy Shoaib took 720 minutes to score 163 against New Zealand in Wellington. Nawab of Pataudi Let us now define 'Indian' more narrowly, as someone holding a passport of the free and sovereign Republic of India. That done, one finds a good number of our fellow citizens among Wisden's list of slowest individual batting performances. These include 5 in 102 minutes by the Nawab of Pataudi, Jr (versus England in 1961-'62), 16 not out in 147 minutes by Dilip Vengsarkar (against Pakistan in 1979-'80), 60 in 390 minutes by Dilip Sardesai (against West Indies in 1961-'62), and, most poignant, 99 in 505 minutes by M L Jaisimha (versus Pakistan in 1960-'61). Sanjay Manjrekar Missing from this list are the names of India's most celebrated defensive batsmen, Vijay Hazare and Vijay Manjrekar. (One name that does figure is Manjrekar's son Sanjay, whose 500 minute hundred against Zimbabwe in 1992-'93 is the fourth slowest Test century ever.) Whatever Wisden may say, or forget to say, for a generation of Indians national self-respect had no more reliable carrier than the broad defensive bats of Hazare and the senior Manjrekar. One Vijay could drive and the other Vijay cut, but it was only in the relaxed world of Ranji Trophy competition that they were allowed to play their strokes. While they represented Nehru's India and the Non-Aligned Movement, the frills had to be strictly cut out. Sunil Gavaskar Also absent from that list is the name of Sunil Gavaskar. He too was a strokemaker turned by the obligations of team and country into a tuk-tuker. For at least the first ten years of his Test career, Gavaskar knew that the most likely way that India would not lose would be if he blocked from the front. Then came Krishnamachari Srikkanth, who encouraged him to think it possible to hit boundaries before the first drinks interval. Lower down the order, Kapil Dev was making old-timers recall the days of C K Nayudu. Not since the great Colonel had Indians has been seen to so consistently hit the ball in the air and out of the ground. Srikkanth and Kapil between them helped redefine the meanings of Indian batsmanship. Notably, their careers coincided with the rise of one-day cricket. The cricket fan thought it time to say bye-bye to tuk-tuk. No longer was he to be satisfied with draws hard won, with centuries carefully crafted over two days and a bit. Which is why I believe that the fellow who named Rahul Dravid the 'Wall' is either sixty years old, or else was brought up by a father who was brought up on Hazare. Which is also why that impressive hoarding did not last long at the Brigade-Residency crossing. When it became clear that the Karnataka batsman would not fit in India's one-day plans, it was time to market somebody or something else. Rahul Dravid Even if Dravid never gain lends his face to a product, I would like to raise two cheers for his style of batsmanship. For the skilled practitioner of tuk-tuk can do more than draw Test matches -- he can help win them too. Don Bradman's Australian teams of the thirties and forties always had one artful blocker. In the greatest of modern Test sides, the West Indies as they were between 1977-'85, the thunder was stolen by the dashers and bashers, by Greendige, Richards, Fredericks, Kallicharan and Lloyd. Yet they could bat freely only because the now forgotten Larry Gomes kept one end going for long periods. Other successful teams have also had one selfless defensive batsman, who allows the others to play around him. In the accomplished Pakistan side of the seventies, Mudassar Nazar or Sadiq Mohammed blocked while strokeplayers like Zaheer Abbas, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal, Javed Miandad and Wasim Raja scored at a rate of knots opposite them. Why go back so far in time? Think only of February and March of this year, and India's surprising victory over the self-appointed world champions. The batting headlines in that series against Australia were claimed by Sidhu, Azharuddin and, above all, Tendulkar. But their sparkle and fizz was only, to say, more flower on the Wall. These strokemakers took Dravid's clam solidity for granted. But after Mark Taylor's men went home, the silly season began. The Indian team moved from Sri Lanka to Sharjah, and will soon go on to Canada. There is talk now of squeezing Dravid into the fourteen for Toronto. Yet it is only when Test cricket resumes, late in the year, that Dravid will resume his proper place in the playing eleven. The public will learn afresh to spell his name. And who knows, while coming down Brigade Road at night, my headlights might shine once more on his face.

[Andrew Peter]

Decent player . Lucky to have played during an era when all the limelight , focus and pressure of expectations was on Sachin , helped him perform much better . Was also fortunate to have played more than 300 Odis inspite of a Tuk Tuk Misbahesqe strike rate .