Dravid’s parting of ways with Rajasthan Royals, and beyond Today Sports News

There really is no place for sentiment in sport, it would appear. Under Erik ten Hag, Manchester United won the FA Cup and the League Cup, yet the Dutchman was sacked by the troubled one-time English giants in October 2024. He subsequently moved to Bayer Leverkusen in the German Bundesliga at the start of this season, but his tenure lasted a mere two league fixtures.

Defending champions Leverkusen completed a double last year under Xabi Alonso (who has since moved to Real Madrid) but began this season poorly, losing their opener to Hoffenheim at home and then frittering away a two-goal advantage to allow ten-man Werder Bremen to salvage a 3-3 draw. That was evidence enough for the club to be convinced that the team wasn’t headed in the right direction, that Ten Hag wasn’t the man to lead them forward. Hence the stunning sack, just weeks into the new season.

Coaches in professional sport are judged by results, and results alone. Some of them get a longer rope because of their track record, others jettisoned immediately — like ten Hag — for one reason or the other. Especially but not exclusively in club football, it’s a rampant trend, though it’s not as if other disciplines are immune from this phenomenon.

Last week, Rahul Dravid parted ways with Rajasthan Royals, the franchise with which he is mainly identified though he played for Royal Challengers Bangalore (as it was called then) for the first three years and captained them in the inaugural edition in 2008. Having completed his assignment as India head coach at the end of the T20 World Cup in June last year, Dravid’s return to Rajasthan in a similar capacity was a no-brainer. He had been associated with the first champions of the IPL for five years from 2011, first as captain and then as team director and mentor, before taking charge of the India ‘A’ and Under-19 teams for four years, between 2015 and 2019.

Forgettable campaign

To lump Dravid’s exit in the same category as ten Hag will be both unfair and untrue. Admittedly, the Royals had a poor 2025 season, registering just four victories and finishing an unedifying ninth in the ten-team tournament. But their campaign appeared doomed from the time long-standing captain Sanju Samson was unable to keep wickets in the first three matches owing to a finger injury sustained during the T20I series against England in January.

With Samson slotting in as an impact player who only batted but didn’t keep wickets, the captaincy was bestowed on a temporary basis on Riyan Parag, one of the five players Rajasthan had retained before the season.

Parag’s appointment came as a surprise given that there were other, more experienced options to pick from, not least opener Yashasvi Jaiswal and West Indian Shimron Hetmyer, both of whom were also retained alongside Dhruv Jurel. Parag wasn’t quite up to scratch as either batter or skipper; perhaps, the first seeds of unease stemmed from his ascension to the throne.

With Dravid’s exit, Rajasthan are now the second IPL franchise without a head coach. Chandrakant Pandit, who was in charge when Kolkata Knight Riders ended a 10-year title drought in 2024, left after deciding to ‘explore new opportunities.’ There has been a growing clamour for more Indian head coaches in the IPL – as of now, the only remaining cricketing bosses are Ashish Nehra (Gujarat Titans) and Hemang Badani (Delhi Capitals) – and the latest developments haven’t helped, but then again, that is the very nature of high-stakes sport, isn’t it?

Within months of Pandit overseeing KKR’s successful march in 2024, Dravid brought the curtain down on a terrific stint with the Indian team by wrapping his hands around meaningful silverware as head coach for the only time.

After winding up his coaching stints with the ‘A’ and Under-19 teams, Dravid moved to the National Cricket Academy (now the Centre of Excellence) as the cricket head in 2019, revolutionising the system and putting processes in place that have been built exponentially on and fine-tuned by his favourite batting partner, V.V.S. Laxman. In November 2021, Dravid succeeded Ravi Shastri as the Indian coach; within a few months, Rohit Sharma was elevated as the all-format captain with Virat Kohli ceding the T20I and Test captaincies (he was removed as ODI skipper). Dravid and Rohit, as different temperamentally as is imaginable, struck up an exceptional relationship based on mutual respect, trust, affection and supreme confidence in each other, leading Indian cricket into the future with an attractive, entertaining brand of play across formats.

Dravid’s two-year contract was to end with the 50-over home World Cup towards the end of 2023. Taking sustained high pressure in their stride, India was outstanding throughout the tournament, winning ten matches on the trot with grand authority and unmatched superiority.

Rohit seemed on course to emulate Mahendra Singh Dhoni by becoming just the second Indian captain to lift the World Cup trophy on home soil until Australia gate-crashed the party in the Ahmedabad final.

Rohit felt there was unfinished business to attend to; it was his phone call that convinced Dravid to stay on for another seven and a half months, until the end of the T20 World Cup. “In some ways, if we had won that game in Ahmedabad, I’m not really sure whether he would have asked me to continue,” Dravid told this writer last September. “Both of us felt there was some unfinished business. We’d done a lot of good work and felt we wanted to have one more crack at it.”

Like in the 50-over version, India were unbeaten heading into the June 29 final in Bridgetown against South Africa. A second heartbreak in a short span appeared imminent with Heinrich Klaasen firing on all cylinders when India came charging back. Spearheaded by Jasprit Bumrah and Hardik Pandya, aided by a sensational last-over catch by Suryakumar Yadav and led inspirationally by Rohit, India overturned a lost cause in stirring fashion to pull off the most unexpected of heists. Not known to great outward shows of emotion, Dravid’s roar as he lifted the trophy showed just how much that success meant to him, though in that moment of triumph too, his quiet dignity remained his staunchest ally.

Unsurprisingly, Dravid has maintained studied silence in the days since Rajasthan Royals put out a statement formalising the former India captain’s departure.

“As part of the franchise structural review, Rahul had been offered a broader position at the franchise, but has chosen not to take this,” the statement revealed. One can’t say this with any certainty, but the ownership group must have been taken aback by Dravid opting for a clean break. Franchise owners aren’t generally accustomed to players/coaches turning them down, but knowing Dravid for as long as they have done, they should have seen this coming.

Dravid doesn’t make compromises at the expense of his integrity and commitment. A ‘broader position’ didn’t interest him once it was obvious that his tenure as a head coach after just one year was coming to an end.

In the last few days, there has been intense speculation about Dravid’s immediate plans. He has been linked with KKR, still without a head coach following Pandit’s decision towards the end of July, as well as with Chennai Super Kings, unsurprising given his strong bond with former BCCI and ICC boss N. Srinivasan, who is back as chairman of Chennai Super Kings Cricket Limited. Perhaps Dravid is considering these options, perhaps he isn’t.

After all, he hasn’t had a ‘break’ for more than three decades, going from aspiring India cricketer to a memorable Test debut in June 1996, establishing himself as an unquestioned, reliable No. 3, taking over the captaincy in 2005 and eventually calling time on his Test career in 2012, after which he moved on to a technical off-field role in various different capacities.

What’s in store?

Will Dravid decide to take some time off now, just to taste life without an official cricketing responsibility? His two boys, Samit and Anvay, are upwardly mobile, the former having just graduated from the Under-19 ranks and the latter making a strong pitch to break into the state U-19 squad when only 17. Maybe the doting father will choose to share his wisdom and expertise and knowledge with his sons, with whom he probably hasn’t been able to spend as much time as all of them would like, given his numerous commitments. Dravid isn’t a hands-on, obsessive parent fussing over his cricketing kids like many others, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t deeply invested in their organic progress.

A decade is a lifetime in the IPL, and Dravid was perhaps exposed to a whole different ideology and style of functioning on his return to Rajasthan Royals after 10 long years. Again at the risk of speculating, that potentially made it harder for him to stick with the franchise, which is a shame as far as the younger players are concerned because there is so much to learn from Dravid – about cricket and technique and batting and game- and situational awareness, sure, but also about life, about how to conduct and carry oneself, about how to channelise aggression and about how to show the world (not that that has ever been a Dravid trait) that nice guys can indeed finish first.

Despite having been in the public glare for decades on end, Dravid is an intensely private person who is a master at keeping his thoughts and emotions to himself and just the closest chosen very few. It’s not that he doesn’t trust easily but he is a great believer in internalising rather than playing his life out for everyone to see, which is why he has stayed away from social media.

In so many ways, he is still an amateur at heart but with a professionalism when it comes to the sport that is almost without parallel. In time, perhaps in a very short time, Rajasthan Royals will realise the folly of letting him go. Cricketing greats like Rahul Dravid, they don’t exactly grow on trees, do they?