Rahul Dravid- The wall

Rahul Dravid's tag, "The Wall", and his reputation do not do justice to the player he is. When you think of Dravid, you think of someone who takes roots the moment he gets to the crease, someone who plays second fiddle to the bigger names in the team and perhaps occasionally emulates Sunil Gavaskar's infamous innings of 36* off 174 balls. Granted his Test record does him far more credit than his one-day innings but his achievements in the shorter form of the game especially in the World Cup are nothing short of impressive.

He is the third Indian and just the sixth player in the world to score 10,000 ODI runs. He is the only Indian to score two back-to-back centuries in a World Cup, against Kenya and Sri Lanka in 1999. He went on to become the highest run-scorer with 461 runs from 8 matches in the tournament which marked his debut. He, as vice-captain and key batsman, took on the additional responsibility of keeping wickets in the 2003 Cup so that his side could fill its requirement of an additional batsman, a move that paid off massively. He is a dab hand at fielding in the slips and currently holds the world record for most catches in Test cricket, having recently pocketed his 200th victim in Dale Steyn in December 2010. He also holds the distinction of being the first and only batsman to have scored centuries in all Test-playing countries.

Now, those are some emphatic records for a man who, for the most part of his career, has had to call upon his yogic powers of concentration to tune out the ever-present naysayers yelling "Too slow!" every time he picks up a bat. He was given captaincy of the one-day unit in 2005, but resigned following a string of failures in September 2007. He was at the helm in 2007 when India suffered its most ignominious exit from the World Cup, with Sri Lanka showing the team the door in spite of the skipper's gritty 60 runs against them. While the general consensus in the cricketing world may now regard Dravid as a spent force in the 50-over format, an Indian Test side without "The Wall" is still a scarily unimaginable prospect.