The Wall is a doorway to the future

Cricket will test him more than anything has so far. The committed worker is now leader, intelligent theories will now have to be seen to work. The thinker becomes doer.

He has done it before — but with his batting where his great intensity has, most times, been his finest asset. His mind and his work ethic have converted his thought into successful action. Now he must do so with ten others, fourteen others, over whom his position might seem to award control.

In reality he knows it is a different story. He needs to think about player contracts which expired on September 30 and about which the BCCI is still debating! He has to work with selectors, which can sometimes be frustrating, and he needs the support of the BCCI, which is more concerned with propping up factions than cricket. He will have his hands full.

And yet we don’t know how good a captain he will be. On paper, and by intuition, and bigger decisions have been taken with those two in mind, he will make a fine leader. Can he marry his intensity with the ability to relax?

Dravid slows things down the day before a match; has a slow shower, a slow breakfast, his own method of de-stressing himself and staying calm. Now he will need to think about what combination to play, what to tell the media, how not to get affected by what they say, about whether he has read the wicket right, about whether he shouldn’t have brought the spinner in a bit earlier.

More interesting, can he separate personal form from the fortunes of the team? A year ago I had done a business programme on CNBC and Sourav Ganguly had said, ‘‘I have told Rahul that when you become captain you will have to separate your two roles. That is the most difficult part.’’

It won’t be easy given the drama that has preceded the awarding of the captaincy and the incessant scrutiny he will be under. Ideally, we must judge leaders over a period of time; Dravid will find he is being judged with every decision he takes. Not over three and a half hours but over every bowling change.

He will have help. There will be mutual admiration with Greg Chappell who, as we know, will talk straight and hard. It is a method Dravid will prefer even if his style will be a little less blunt than Chappell’s.

But he will have to be his own man and for that he must work out where Chappell’s role ends and his begins. There are no formulae for such things for they evolve over time, after a few mistakes. Dravid needs time and hopefully the selectors will see that.

His ‘‘good guy’’ image will not come in the way. It is a mistaken belief that nice guys cannot play hard. Glenn McGrath and Anil Kumble are nice men and in their differing styles they play a hard game.

And Dravid will play it as hard as anyone else for he is a tough man, committed to helping India do well. Like all of us he is often frustrated, occasionally disgusted, but he will not lose an opportunity to see India succeed. Everything else will come second.

On the way though he will have to rub some people the wrong way. He has hardly ever done that and it will be interesting to see how he reacts to people who have a voice but for whom he has no time. There are many of those in our cricket.

And he will always place team first. To that extent, the last two weeks in Australia would have provided invaluable lessons. If ever the strength of a team, of a collection of like-minded people, needed to be proved (and by inference the fragility of a collection of diverse individuals), Australia showed that as indeed England did in the Ashes series.

The value of talent is enormous, as Tendulkar has shown over the years and Thierry Henry does now for Arsenal, but it fades before the collective force of attitude. If a choice has to be made, it has necessarily to go in favour of attitude. To establish that doctrine, Dravid needs time for it is a doctrine that needs establishing.

Never has India’s cricket administration been in greater disarray, never has it been more self-seeking, never has cricket stood for so little. It is in such an atmosphere that Dravid starts his innings as captain of India. If he can convince India that his team will play honest cricket he will find a lot of support.