Rahul Dravid opens up: How Kapil Dev's advice helped him select coaching, insecurities as a cricketer

Bengaluru, July 18: Once the pillar of Indian batting line-up, Rahul Dravid switched seamlessly to coaching after his playing days. Dravid, who once was the captain-coach of Rajasthan Royals in the IPL, then took India under-19 under his wings along with India A.

Under his coaching, India had won the U-19 World Cup in 2018 in New Zealand and then took over as the chief of the National Cricket Academy (NCA). The former Indian captain Dravid detailed how he zeroed in on the career as a coach.

"After I finished the playing career, there were quite a few options and I wasn't necessarily sure what to do. It was Kapil Dev who gave me this advice actually when I was in coming to the end of my career," Dravid told former India opener and current women's team coach WV Raman in his YouTube chat show 'Inside Out'.

"I bumped into him somewhere and he said: 'Rahul don't commit to doing anything straightaway, go out and spend a few years just exploring and doing different things and see what you really like'. I thought it was good advice so I was also a little fortunate that at the back end of my career I was already in a sort of captain's-coach kind of role with Rajasthan Royals," said Dravid.

Dravid also spoke about the time when insecurity beseeched him after getting dropped from the ODI side in the late 90s.

"There have been phases in my international career (when I felt insecure). I was dropped from the ODI team in 1998. I had to fight my way back in, was away from the Indian team for a year. There were certain insecurities than about whether I'm a good enough one-day player or not because I always wanted to be a Test player, was coached to be a Test player, hit the ball on the ground, don't hit the ball in the air, coaching like that. You sort of worry whether you had the skills to be able to do it (in an ODI)," Dravid said.

Dravid also revealed several phases of insecurities while growing up as a cricketer.

"I have gone through many phases of insecurities. Growing up as a young cricketer in India is not easy, there's a lot of competition and especially in the times I grew up there was only the Ranji Trophy and the Indian team, there was no IPL. Even the money in Ranji Trophy was so poor that there was always that constant challenge. You've given up a career in studies, I was not bad in it, so I could've easily done an MBA or something.

"I forego that for a career in cricket and if the cricket didn't work out there was nothing much to fall back on. So, there was a level of insecurity at that age. This kind of helps me when I interact with cricketers of this generation. I can understand some of the insecurities that they go through," Dravid said.