Rahul Dravid was one of India’s greatest batsmen ever to play cricket. He was also famous as The Wall in the cricket world. He is a former Indian captain, too, who is now working with the Indian cricket team as a coach. Rahul Dravid is very famous among Indians and got fan-base worldwide due to his batting style; he was a tough batsman to bowl out for all of the bowlers worldwide. Today you will learn about infamous cricketer Rahul Dravid’s career highlights and how he became one of the greatest batsmen in the world.
Rahul Dravid was born in January 1973 to a Marathi family and was raised in Bangalore. He started taking cricket training at the age of 12. He represented Karnataka at youth level cricket and managed to play in u-15, u-17, u- 19 domestic tournaments from Karnataka. He performed well during his Under 19 level tournament and caught the attention of former cricketer Keki Tarapore.
Later, he was selected for the Karnataka Ranji team and finally played his first-ever professional domestic match of Ranji in February 1991. He scored 82 runs in his debut match, and slowly he became one of the key members of the Karnataka team at the domestic level. He then played multiple tournaments, such as Duleep Trophy and other zonal tournaments.
The consistent and impressive performance of Rahul Dravid at the domestic level for all those years earned him a chance to play for the Indian national team. He was called up for a couple of matches of Wills World Series in 1994 but did not play any single match. Then for a couple of years, he went back to the domestic level and performed well by scoring many runs for his team. Finally, he made his international debut against Sri Lanka in 1996. However, he could not perform as expected in the debut match and scored just two runs but was called up again for a match against Pakistan. He was known for his batting in test matches rather than limited over cricket.
His ability to spend time on crease and scoring runs, and making it hard for the opposition to get him out was why he was referred to as The Wall. So he finally made his test debut against England in 1996, and it could have been a dream debut, but he fell short of five runs. However, Rahul Dravid scored 95 runs in the first innings of his debut test match. He also scored fifty in another match of the same series, and thus, it was an impressive debut from Rahul Dravid.
Rahul Dravid played the inaugural edition of IPL in 2008 and was picked up by Royal Challengers Bangalore. He played for RCB for three years before moving to Rajasthan Royals. There he helped the Rajasthan Royals to reach the finals of champions league T20 in 2013. He performed well in IPL for Rajasthan and has a major influence on the team and its performance. After the champions league T-20 2013, he retired from the T-20 cricket career. If you want to look at his T-20 stat, he played 89 IPL matches in which he scored over 2100 runs in his IPL career. However, he only played one T-20 international match, and soon after, he retired from international cricket.
Rahul Dravid was more of a test match batsman as he has a defensive batting style. In the early phase of his international cricket career, he struggled to score runs in ODI as much as he was scoring in test matches. But he keeps working hard on his technique to make it suitable for limited cricket. And after years of hard work, he managed to do well in ODI as he also has the ICC player of the year award to his name.
Rahul Dravid has played 164 test matches for India in which he managed to score above 13000 runs which is very impressive. He also has played 344 ODI matches in which he has a total of over 10000 runs. He also did wicket-keeping for India until India found their main keeper MS Dhoni.
Rahul’s Coaching Career
After retiring from cricket, Rahul did not stop participating in cricket; retiring, he coached and nurtured the youngsters playing for India in the upcoming years. In 2014 and 2015, he played the role of mentor for Rajasthan Royals in the IPL. After IPL, he started coaching India U-19 and India A teams to build a good youth cricket system, which can benefit the Indian senior cricket team. Following IPL 2022, it was rumored that Rahul might return to the IPL, but instead, he took the major responsibility of head coach of the Indian cricket team.