As Rahul Dravid bids farewell to Team India, the legend said that the period when the players were coming out of the pandemic was a tough one for him as he had just taken over as coach and “never envisaged” that he would have to work with half a dozen captains.

“One of the things that we really had to manage, especially in the early part of my coaching tenure here with India... We were at the back end of the Covid restrictions.

“We really had to manage their workloads through all the three different formats. There were a few injuries and it led to me working with something like 5-6 captains in the first 8-10 months of me being here.

“It was definitely something that I hadn’t envisaged,” Dravid said on bcci.tv.

During his time as head coach, Dravid claimed he detested cutting and switching up the line-up too much and always attempted to act as a counterbalance for captain Rohit Sharma so the latter could come up with winning plans of his own.

“I’m someone who actually likes continuity and don’t like to chop and change too many things because I believe that creates a lot of instability and doesn’t create very good environment.

“I feel that I am a part of the team whose responsibility is to create the right professional, safe, secure environment that doesn’t really have a fear of failure as such but is challenging enough to push people. That has always been my endeavour.

“Over the last two-and-a-half years, especially in white-ball cricket and lately towards the back-end even in red-ball cricket, we were able to give a lot of youngsters a lot of opportunities, bring a lot of people into the side. Some of them developed and stayed on in the side a little bit longer...”