Crumbling of 'The Wall'

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Mohali: Since the home series against South Africa, it has been a pretty much crumbling of 'The Wall', brick by brick, and Rahul Dravid faces a race against time to haul himself out of the hole before the quicksand of failure gobbles him up.

His halcyon days well behind him, the bulwark of the team is now very much its weakling and with the likes of S Badrinath and Cheteshwar Pujara knocking repeatedly at the selectors' door, time, as well as public patience, is running out fast for the man whose last 10 Test match aggregate reads a pathetic 322.

Unfortunately, Wednesday’s optional net session could not lift his morale either. Dravid came last, jogged for about five minutes and was engaged in a long chat with mental conditioning coach Paddy Upton for the next 20 minutes.

In the nets, spin twins Pragyan Ojha and Amit Mishra bowled to him before local pace bowlers took over. One of them twice beat Dravid and then eventually sent his leg-stump cartwheeling, breaching the legendary wall of defence, which once stood impregnable even in the face of some of the best fast bowling in the world.

As his recent dismissals suggest, Dravid does not come across as the master of his technique, rather looks its prisoner. The bat has been virtually an extension of his arm but these days, he hardly middles the ball.

Jabbing outside off-stump and a tentative footwork unmistakable signs of a muddled mind are the two gremlins that have crept into his game of late and Dravid struggles to banish the demons.

Even when he put bat to the ball, chances are more that he would find the fielder and not the gap. The more he tries to clamber out of the hole, the bigger it gets and the seed of self-doubt sown by repeated failures means he is hardly in the best frame of mind when he takes the strike.

For someone who always took the game seriously, almost to the extent of often overlooking the funny side of it and looking apologetic after a mishit, the pressure intensified on Dravid especially after the retirement of former skippers Sourav Ganguly and Anil Kumble.

And though the Karnataka player still enjoys the backing of the men who matter, captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni and chief selector Krish Srikkanth, repeated failure has only compounded his crisis.