Rahul Dravid Has To Be The Most Game-Aware Cricketer: Ravichandran Ashwin
Mar 3, 2017 at 3:12 PM
India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin has called Rahul Dravid as the most ‘game-aware’ person he has ever seen.
Ashwin has shared the dressing room with some of the finest cricketers of this generation – Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, MS Dhoni- all of whom have left their own legacy in international cricket but the spinner believes that Dravid is ahead of his contemporaries when it comes to game awareness.
”Rahul has to be the most game-aware person that I have ever known and this attribute often goes unnoticed, but then you have to sit back and admire this trait. Game awareness is often the most underrated parts of the team but when each of the 11 players thinks and knows about their roles it takes the team well ahead of the competition. I witnessed it first hand against England and firmly believe that the English team were far ahead when it came down to game awareness than the other teams,” Ashwin said during the launch of Aakash Chopra’s book Numbers Do Lie.
When the Tamil Nadu ace was asked to compare Rahul Dravid with Sachin Tendulkar, the 30-year old said:“With Sachin, you will have to consider the 1990s and early 2000s when he was just fantastic.”
“Rahul Bhai was fabulous when it came to thinking about the game and he not only added value with his advice but also made sure that you are on the same page. His advice would not only be restricted to batting, well you associate batsmen with only their batting and they would more often than not be full of themselves and would only speak about their game. With Rahul bhai it was very different, he understood almost all the skillsets which is needed in the game and his nuances were fabulous. He also won quite a few matches as a captain and I am not one bit surprised,” he added.
Former Australia opener Mathew Hayden, who was also among the attendees, agreed with Ashwin’s claims and even compared Dravid with Tennis legend Ivan Lendl.
“Talking about game awareness and there was no better person than Rahul Dravid. There was no sense of superstition in his game and the way he setup his entire innings was just fabulous. He is probably the Ivan Lendl of cricket,” said Hayden.
One of the finest batsmen of all time, Dravid played over 500 international games for India, scoring over 23,000 runs before retiring from the game in 2012.