Rahul Dravid to retire from ODIs

Northampton: In an apparent snub to BCCI, India’s veteran batsman Rahul Dravid announced his retirement from the One Day International matches & will also take retirement from the T20 matches after the England tour.

It was a matter of astonishment that, from the last two years Dravid is not at all a part of the ODI team, but after a long time he got selected & after that he announced his retirement, though he was a part of the one day team for the England series.

"I am honored and privileged to be selected in the Indian one-day team," said Rahul, after the warm-up match of the team against Northampton in which he did not played. "Since I had not been picked for one-day cricket for the last two years, I was obviously a little surprised and to be honest, because I had not been picked," he added this statement with his decision of retirement. He also mentioned to the media that, before the announcement of the one day team, Dravid did not inform this to the BCCI. Right now he just wants to concentrate on the test matches only. "I am committed, as always to give my best to India in this one-day series and obviously the Test series that follows."

Dravid was named in the one day international team which is scheduled to play from August 31, 2011 in England. After hitting consecutive two centuries in the test matches, Dravid got the opportunity to play in the one day international again after a time period of two years to provide stability to a fragile line-up struggling in the seaming English conditions. The last ODI played by Dravid was in the Champions Trophy series against the West Indies, in 2009, Johannesburg, South Africa. Dravid has made 10765 runs in 339 ODIs with an average of 39.43 with 12 hundreds and 82 fifties. He has not played any Twenty20 International match.

He recently became the second highest run-getter in Test cricket — 12576 runs from 155 matches — behind Sachin Tendulkar and also leveled Sunil Gavaskar’s 34 Test centuries to become the joint highest Indian century maker.

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