Rahul Dravid and all that you can't leave behind

He sits there, padded up, reading a book, while a young 20 something in the form of Gautam Gambhir and a slightly rotund bald man with no respect for technique are making batting look ridiculously simple, smashing boundaries at will and playing with an abandon that he was told was simply counterproductive to the science of batting. The book in his hands seems like a self-help title. In this moment of failure, he seeks answers as he always did. In theory and education, when twenty minutes of bravado and batting without a helmet might just turn things around ... old habits die hard, not matter how cerebral the thinker.

Rahul Dravid stares vacantly, yet intensely at the pages which he is struggling to read. His attention is no longer his own, his mind hijacked by the thoughts of a string of recent failures that put even the celebrated law of averages to shame.

There can be a few logical reasons that explain this deviation from even this most agreed upon statistical principle... One ... he is no longer good enough at this level of the game .... Two... there is a flaw in his technique.

His record and statistics preclude his acceptance of point one. As for point two, he spoke to Sunil Gavaskar yesterday, and unlike Saeed Anwar and Saurav Ganguly before him who spoke to the sage and saw immediate results, this is not to be for him thirty minutes after he takes guard.

What is he to do now? Is he to entertain acceptance of point 1 at some point and give in to the abyss of self-doubt, to sink into a vortex from which few have found escape? For someone who has played cricket for twenty years with as much intensity as anyone else, I can tell you that batting is both the most fulfilling and the cruelest discipline of the game. You wait your turn patiently, watching others play shots that you know you can eclipse ... you wait till the bowler runs in, with hopes and great aspirations, only for everything to end even faster than it had begun.

There's little that anyone can say to help Rahul. From one Bangalore boy to another, I only hope he is offered a few lives before he gets to a decent score and begins to believe in the Fates that watch over this game. For the moment, his first mistake of his innings is his last, and no batsman has been as unlucky as he has been for so long.