“Was Never Going To Be Like Virender Sehwag”: Rahul Dravid On How He Took A Different Route To Success

Rahul Dravid, the current head coach of the Indian cricket team, was one of the most talented batters during his playing days. The former India captain made his Test and ODI debut in 1996 and then went on to score 13288 and 10889 runs in the two formats respectively. He had come under pressure too and faced tough situations due to lean patches in his career. But almost always he made brilliant comebacks and become one of the greatest batters ever in world cricket.

Now, in a recent podcast ‘In the Zone’, with India’s first individual Olympic gold medalist Abhinav Bindra, Dravid has revealed how switching off from the game helped him mentally.

“If I look back on my career, that..managing my energy, more of my mental energy was the real game-changer in terms of longetivity in my career and in terms of performance. I used to expend a lot of energy, even when I was not playing, thinking about my game, may be reflecting on it, worrying about it. In time I kind of learned that was not necessarily actually not helping my sport or helping me play better. I needed to refresh and almost find a life outside of cricket,” Dravid said in the podcast.

“I was still always never going to be like Viru, like Virender Sehwag, who found it much easier to switch off because of his personality outside of the game. I was never going to get to that level. But certainly I started recognising the red flags. I knew I needed to find a way to switch it off but it was the mental side of the thing that you need to help yourself. It came down to you recognising that this was as important to you as those extra hours in the gym and practice sessions. If you did all of that but were unable to switch off mentally, you are not gonna have enough energy to play the game. Once I start recognising that three or four years in my career, I started to make an effort to switch off a lot more and it helped me a lot.”