Rahul Dravid celebrated his 39th birthday on Wednesday and entered a very select club, even as things otherwise look bleak for India. However, Arunabha Sengupta argues that this may be the start of the brightest phase yet for the Golden Age of Indian batting.
Published: Jan 12, 2012, 10:22 AM (IST)
Edited: Aug 27, 2014, 09:37 PM (IST)
Rahul Dravid — now the 8th oldest Test cricketer from India © AFP
Rahul Dravid celebrated his 39th birthday on Wednesday and entered a very select club, even as things otherwise look bleak for India. However, Arunabha Sengupta argues that this may be the start of the brightest phase yet for the Golden Age of Indian batting.
Rahul Dravid’s 39th birthday will probably be a whiff of soothing air to a battered, beleaguered and controversy-ridden team who cannot even enjoy themselves without accusing fingers pointing and gesticulating in every direction.
While the turbulent times have been somewhat distracted by net-wide circulating conjectures about January 11, 1973 – whether even the delivering doctor and his team of nurses found it difficult to get Dravid out on that auspicious day 39 years back – the birthday boy himself joins a very select group of Indian cricketers.
Dravid is still half a career away from the likes of Wilfred Rhodes, who kept playing till he was 52, or Bert Ironmonger, WG Grace and George Gunn, each of whom celebrated the half century of life by turning out for the country. But, he is now the 8th oldest Test cricketer from India – a nation not very well known for rickety old veterans taking the field in international encounters.
Only six Indian cricketers have played Test matches beyond the age of 40. Vinoo Mankad leads the list, having appeared in his last Test just two months shy of his 42nd birthday. Lala Amarnath kept at it till he was 41, and Rustomji Jamshedji was as old when he turned out for his only Test match. Three other men, CK Nayudu, Cotar Ramaswamy and Vijay Merchant have represented India after spending four decades on the planet.
Dravid now catches up with Hemu Adhikari, who played his final Test at 39.
Three and a half months from now, if he does not turn the nation upside down by announcing his retirement before that, Sachin Tendulkar will be joining the exclusive 39-plus club.
Interestingly, the elder stalwarts hail from the early days of Indian cricket, when the infancy of the sport had kept the time tables from becoming too cluttered. The last of the 40-plus brigade, Vinoo Mankad, hung up his boots by in 1959, after the same Test in which Colonel Adhikari fought his last war on the cricket field.
It is an indicator of the increasingly tight schedules and the painstaking demands of the game since then that in the fifty or so interim years, no other Indian cricketer has played till the age of 39. At the same time, it may also be a reflection of the fast forward to a youth-oriented culture, where more than two or three successive failures can have an entire nation snapping at the ageing heels, demanding a facelift through youthful implants in the line-up.
Now, however, with Dravid already 39, and Tendulkar to follow suit a few days later, Indian cricket may be on the verge of witnessing something special.
While many may rue the dearth of batting reserves which has fallen pitiably short of producing replacements for this amazing duo, it is a scarcely known statistical fact that historically 39 has been the vintage batting age which has outscored all others.
Indeed, if age-wise scores of all specialist batsmen in Test cricket are considered, 39 ends up with the highest average. A plausible reason for this is that if someone is still playing at 39, he has to be very, very good and through the years spent at the wicket, has perhaps achieved the cricketing equivalent of enlightenment. These two gentlemen in the Indian middle order can both qualify as the very personification of the term.
So, as Dravid and Tendulkar follow each other into their last year in the 30s, the next few months may bring forth some yet unseen gems of these two glittering careers.
(Arunabha Sengupta is trained from Indian Statistical Institute as a Statistician. He works as a Process Consultant, but purifies the soul through writing and cricket, often mixing the two into a cleansing cocktail. The author of three novels, he currently resides in the incredibly beautiful but sadly cricket-ignorant country of Switzerland. His author site is at http://www.senantix.com, his cricket blogs at http://senantixtwentytwoyards.blogspot.com and he can be followed on twitter at http://twitter.com/senantix)
