10 less gifted cricketers who became legends
It is hard not to romanticise a game like cricket. There is so much involved at so many different levels, you cannot quite put your finger on just one aspect that you could do with or without. Some players were gifted with a lot of talent and very little temperament. Some were not naturally gifted. They didn’t come with a silken touch or natural swing.
Yet, would you really call them not gifted because some of them went on to become legends ahead of all the gifted ones, on the sheer power of their will and temperament, patience, forbearance and a zillion other qualities that we don’t quite categorise under “gifted” when we speak about great players.
One needs to only look at Vinod Kambli and Rahul Dravid and you realise that there is only so far natural gifts can take you. This article is an ode to all those wonderful players who started well behind the so-called “gifted players”, but competed hard and strived for excellence with so much obsession that they finished way ahead of a lot of their gifted contemporaries.
1. Allan Border
Every year, the best Australian player gets the Allan Border Medal, named after a man who took up captaincy with his team in trouble and turned them into world champions and Ashes-winning machines.
More importantly, without the silken cover drive or the elegant flick through midwicket, Border went on to score 11,174 runs, which was the most at his time of retirement, at an average of 50.56 having played the most Tests at the time and the most consecutive Tests. Border had a woodcutter’s focus and a mason’s perseverance and he applied them with great effect to a game which was supposed to favour the gifted.
2. Rahul Dravid
Rahul Dravid was not gifted with the precocious talent that makes players like Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and Virat Kohli get noticed at an early stage. However, Dravid proved by the end of his career that excessive talent is just a distraction to the talents that one can hone based on their game.
With the most minutes at the crease, Dravid became a player you would bet your life on if it was on the line. Many swear by his cover drive and lovely on-drive, but what made the man who boasts of more erudite fans than fanatics stand out was the fact that he could put those strokes on the back-burner and grind the opposition down when it mattered most. Therein lies his greatness.
A colossal 13288 runs and 31258 balls faced are ample proof that he was the man when the chips were down. Like Matthew Hayden said, Dravid was the epitome of aggression but in the most gentlemanly way possible. In many ways, therefore, he was not inherently gifted like many of his colleagues, but his head ensured he honed the right weapons.