Rahul Dravid should take a break

It is painful to see how Dravid has been deteriorating over the past six months or so. In his 26 test innings this year Rahul Dravid scored only a single century and 4 fifties with just around 600 runs. Perhaps this has been his worst year considering the fact that he played 14 tests so far.

In fact, the year 2008 started on a great note for him with a couple of solid 50s in Australia and a very good century at Chennai against the South African pace battery. However, since then he has been getting starts but getting out in very unconvincing manners.

Dravid has been a victim of the ‘uncertainity’ (mainly from last set of national selectors) that has been prevailing over the ‘Fab 5’ of India, off which, two already called it quits. Out of the remaining, VVS and Tendulkar are at least playing in their free-flow mode where as ‘The Wall’ is not able to come to terms with his remaining career time. To make things worse and time-critical, he is getting no younger and will turn 36 next month. Looks like this is a good time for him to take a break or even hang the boots as he doesn’t seem to have anything left in him to inspire and mentor the youngsters.

Unfortunately the Indian think tank, including Mahendra Singh Dhoni, did not do a great favor to him by still sending him at #3 even at his worst times. Looking at his form and tendency to play away from the body these days, they should have sent Laxman at #3, followed by Tendulkar and Dravid should have come at #5. This would have been a great opportunity for both Dravid and Laxman. But as it looks the entire team composition is screwed up with the current batting order and that got exposed bigtime today in the first innings against England at Chennai.

Since Yuvaraj Singh not getting any clue of what test cricket is all about, the selectors now have to revert to Rohit Sharma at the earliest and groom him as a strong middle order batsman.

With Dravid, Tendulkar and Laxman all set to go out soon, where is the test team heading? MS Dhoni is definitely going to have some headache soon, though in his thoughts at the moment, he wants to get rid of the oldmen.