Captain Rohit Sharma "Deeply Cared About...": Rahul Dravid Reflects His Tenure As India Head Coach

The Rahul Dravid-Rohit Sharma partnership as a head coach-captain reaped great results for the Indian cricket team. Asia Cup 2023 was the first title that the duo won together. Some months later India made it to the final of the Cricket World Cup under the captaincy of Rohit and coaching of Dravid, though they lost to Australia in the summit clash. The captain-coach duo also played instrumental role in India's T20 World Cup victory in 2024. The two, without a doubt, shared a great bond and the results of it reflected in India's success between 2022 and 2024.

The two turned out to be one of the most successful captain-coach pairings in the national team's history. On Ashwin's YouTube channel, Dravid revealed the mindset of captain Rohit towards his team. He also spoke in detail about his bond with Rohit he shared during his India coaching role.

"It was really good. The thing with Rohit that I always felt was that he deeply cared about the team and he was, right from the first day, he was very clear about how he wanted to run the team and what was important to him," Dravid said.

"And that's really important in any relationship between a captain and a coach, especially the way I coach. I always like to believe that it should be the captain's team."

"I've been a player, and I've been a captain as well, but a captain has to lead in terms of the direction he wants to go in, and you have to support him and help him in that," he added.

Dravid said Rohit was "very clear" about what he wanted from the team and how it should operate, adding that his experience also helped.

"You sometimes need to help a captain in terms of getting that clarity and understanding what is required," Dravid said.

"But with Rohit, I thought he was very clear about what he wanted from the team, how he wanted the environment to be, how he wanted the atmosphere to be, and how he wanted things to run," Dravid said.

"He had so much experience over the years, and that really helped. He was very clear on those things," he added.

Dravid said he understood the requirement was to create a comfortable environment for Rohit to operate.

"For me, it was just working with him on challenging him at times on certain things, but also just working with him to ensure that you know, he was able to be comfortable in that space," Dravid said.

"Because I knew once he was comfortable in that space, then he was going to perform and he was going to get everyone else to perform." Former India captain Dravid said being able to chat with Rohit on non-cricket matters also helped them as a pair.

"I just enjoyed sort of getting to know him as a person and chatting with him. There were a lot of times (during) our conversations, we were comfortable enough to be able to sit and have conversations with each other without having to talk only cricket," he said.

"It felt easy spending time in the evening with him to have a meal, you know, I wasn't forced or it wasn't like, 'oh, we have to convince it and have a meeting'," he added.

"Having seen him as an U-19 kid and given him his first gap as a cricketer to see how he grew as a person and as a leader was actually really nice," Dravid said.

(With PTI Inputs)

Topics mentioned in this article

Cricket India Cricket Team Rahul Dravid Rohit Sharma