The Driving Force behind Dravid, Ganguly, Chappell and Vengsarkar

With all the talk, muck and controversy surrounding the main stage of Indian cricket, with its cast of main characters in the form of Dravid, Chappell, Ganguly and Vengsarkar, one is led into endless discussions about who is right and who is wrong, what are the differences in opinion between the coach and the ex-captain, the coach and the chief selector, the present and the past captain. So much so, that one tends to forget that ultimately it is the wonderful game that we are all concerned with.

And talking about the wonderful game, the principal characters of today’s controversies are bound together by perhaps the most sublime sights of the sport – the drive.

No matter what their current relationship dynamics are, these four are perhaps four of the best players of the drive the history of the game has ever witnessed.

The drive as a stroke has a charm of its own. While perfect execution is all about timing and less about brute force – with the possible exclusion of players like Andrew Flintoff and Mahendra Singh Dhoni – it is that stroke that brings to the fore all the poise, elegance and balance of a batsman. A properly executed front foot drive which beats the cover or mid off or mid on and scorches the turf to the fence is a sight for the gods and the best advertisement for the connoisseur of cricket.

While there have been superb drivers of the cricket ball from Hammond to Gower, from Graveney to Tendulkar, the four in question were and are masters of the stroke in their own right.

Greg Chappell, with the handlebar moustache he sometimes sported during his playing days, looked a bit savage in appearance, but there was no savagery in the clinical perfection of stroke making. He was elegance personified, especially when playing the on-drive, perhaps the most difficult stroke in the game. And it is a tribute to his excellence that he could play the on drive anywhere from the left of mid on to right of square leg. The secret was that he could play the ball late, as late as possible, and could delay the drive enough to play it as square as he wished to.
On the offside too, he was peerless. To use a Cardus cliché, he never seemed to force the ball away, but simply dismissed it from his presence. He brought a certain lazy elegance to his stroke making as he could repeatedly find gaping holes in the crowded cover regions and plug them with strokes to the boundary.

For someone who was detected with a bottom hand grip unsuitable for off side strokes by the numerous pundits that flood Indian cricket, Dilip Vengsarkar turned out to be a great player of the cover drive – perhaps the best in the world in his time. The image of his six foot one inch frame going down to almost sniff the ball, the bat completing its elegant swing and ending up facing the bowler in follow through and the ball disappearing between cover point and extra cover was perhaps the picture that symbolized the great Indian batting strength of the eighties. His cover drives were probably at the peak during the enormously successful English tour of 1986 during which he won two test matches with his bat.
However, Vengsarkar’s drives were not restricted to the cover region. He was also the best on driver of his time and his characteristic strokes between mid on and mid wicket were aptly nicknamed ‘rifle shot’ by the hapless English bowlers in keeping with his nickname, Colonel. The on-drive was perhaps what became his signature shot. When Allan Border’s Australia played against him, there was always an orthodox mid on stationed to cut off his favorite stroke. He also played some brilliant straight drives. One off Wasim Akram during the Calcutta Test in 1986 is unforgettable, the timing so impeccable that it looked little more than a defensive push as it raced its way to the sight screen. The straight drives were perhaps perfected through years of gulli cricket in the Mumbai lanes.


Unlike the others, Sourav Ganguly’s drives are limited to one part of the ground, in the area between point and mid off. According to Rahul Dravid’s famous quote, he is next to God on the off side. There are two things that characterize a Ganguly drive. One is the natural grace of a left hander and the other is his sublime timing that does away with the need of a follow through.
While the slashed square drive that he plays past point and gully does bring him a lot of runs and also causes his downfall every now and then, he looks distinctly more solid and elegant when he drives through the covers. One can recall many such strokes from his debut innings, as also from his century at Brisbane, but one cannot really recall his edging or snicking to the keeper or slips while executing a cover drive. The reason for this is probably his movement prior to the off and cover drives which ensures strokes close to the body and also controls the possible away movement of a swinging ball. However, it is precisely the lack of this adjustment which makes the slashed square drive so vulnerable a stroke for him, most often played away from the body.

The difference between the other three batsmen with Rahul Dravid when it comes to drives is that while the others, especially Vengsarkar and Chappell, were technically correct in the execution of the strokes, they also brought with them a personal flourish which characterized the strokes and lent their own signature on them. Rahul Dravid, on the other hand, does lend his signature to his drives, but in a different manner. He does away with almost the last remnants of personal innovation and plays the drive through the covers or through mid off or past the bowler with the stamp of the MCC Coaching Manual firmly embossed on the stroke. Perhaps no other batsman has ever played the drive with such unbelievable technical correctness and this is perhaps what lends a Rahul Dravid signature to the strokes.
What contributes to Dravid’s enormous success is perhaps his balance while playing the shots, which has reached new heights of stability after the turn of the century and keeps improving every day. However, it is while playing the on drive that perhaps Dravid goes beyond the coaching manual and lends an oriental majesty that makes it a delight to watch as the ball disappears either past mid on or past mid wicket.
The reliance on the coaching manual is not a result of shortage of skill or ability, for he has plenty of both and in rare matches – mostly domestic – he does display some of the free flowing strokes that would have made him a more exciting, if somewhat less successful, batsman. Sometimes, these strokes do grace the international stage. A back foot on drive in his third test match at the Kotla, an on driven six off Donald in 1996 and a cover driven six against Sri Lanka during that mammoth partnership with Sourav Ganguly are the ones that stick to memory. However, by choice, he has become the technically correct player that he is today, and no one complains for he has proven to be the greatest match winner with the bat that India has ever witnessed.

Looking at the career averages of the four, one sees a distinct gulf between Chappell/Dravid and Vengsarkar/Ganguly. The experts agree on the easier task of batsmanship nowadays, so perhaps we can rate the levels of success as Dravid, Chappell, Vengsarkar and Ganguly in that order with reasonable gap between the second and the third. The reason for the difference in success is perhaps that while all four were brilliant on the front foot, Dravid and Chappell were distinctly more assured and comfortable on the back foot as well.

Chappell was a compulsive hooker, and a superb exponent of the horizontal bat shots. The biggest testimony to this is the fact that his best series finds no mention in the record books. He scored over six hundred runs at an average in the high sixties against the fearsome pace attack of Holding, Roberts, Garner and Croft during the World Series Parallel Tests organized by Kerry Packer. Brought up on the fast pitches of Australia and with the in-house sessions with Lillee and Thomson, he was one of the foremost players of fast bowling.

Vengsarkar’s career can be divided into three parts – pre 1983 stability, 1983-1987 greatness and post 1987 decline. During the pre-1983 days, he enjoyed the hook and it also often brought about his downfall. While the West Indies were in India in 1983, he got two hundreds against Marshall and Holding and topped the averages. During that period, he used a lighter bat and played the square cut and the late drive off the back foot past point very profitably. He also pulled a lot; a short arm pull during his 159 at the Kotla went to the boundary on first bounce and is still remembered with awe.
However, with his enormous success in the mid eighties, mostly in England and India, and his lordly driving, he dispensed with the hook, which he considered too risky. He also started using a heavier bat. His two centuries against Patterson, Walsh and Davis in 1987 were comparatively much slower and the scoring strokes were mainly off the front foot. While this did work in India, it made him a very slow accumulator of runs in Australia in 1986. He suffered from the same malaise as the current Indian batsmen in South Africa, who seem to have only the backfoot defensive prod as the stroke against short ball. Although he managed an average of 60 against the Aussies down under, he came a cropper against Ambrose, Walsh. Marshall and Bishop in the Caribbeans in 1988. As his form deserted him, he went back to the hook as a scoring option, but in spite of all his success in domestic cricket, could not carry it off on the fast wickets of Australia in 1991.

Sourav Ganguly has the same shortcoming against the short ball and that is why his performances in South Africa and Australia have been abysmal. True, he did get a century in Brisbane, but that was against an attack without McGrath, Lee and Warne, with Gillespie and Bracken sharing the new ball. He looks distinctly, almost embarrassingly, uncomfortable against the short ball, and although he sometimes brings off the pull shot, it has none of the elegance associated with his drives and more often than not brings about his downfall. His cut is a more profitable stroke, but he tends to play it in the air, especially on wickets with appreciable bounce, and it is never a safe scoring option for him.

Rahul Dravid’s strength is his technique, and as in his drives, his backfoot play is characterized by the adherence to the coaching manual. For someone who plays as straight as possible – with a minor adjustment in technique with the face of the bat turned towards mid on to negate the chances of an outside edge – Dravid is surprisingly also the best player of the hook and the pull in the current Indian side. Only VVS Laxman comes somewhat close, while Tendulkar, being shorter, tends to play the pull shot more in the air.
Dravid’s pull and hook shots are also technically correct, with him bringing the bat down from above the ball so that in the case of a mistimed shot the stroke generally goes to the ground as a bottom edge rather than flying up as a top edge. However, the most famous top edge that I remember was the one that went for a six to take him to his century during the match winning 233 down under.
Apart from the leg side shots, Dravid is also an excellent player of the square cut and the back foot cover drive, which are the reasons why he succeeds in all those wickets on which it is a tradition for the Indian batsmen to struggle.

However, whatever be the shortcomings and plus points, let me reiterate that the four batsmen discussed in the post are four of the best players of the drive the world has seen. Whenever the topic involving them turn towards controversies, experiments, sitting ducks against the short ball and so on, let us remain focused on beautiful cricket and remember their exploits in playing the most elegant stroke of the game.