Those figures, even accounting for two bum decisions that cut him off at the knees in Durban, are way below Rahul Dravid's par.

And it was not as if he was in the middle of a form slump: in June, for instance, he had played an innings that deserves to be replayed endlessly - the one in Jamaica, where he scored 81 runs in a team score of 215 on a pitch no other batsman on either side could fathom, and in the process played more deliveries than the entire West Indies side in the first innings.

Yet, the poor scores in South Africa are not the reason the tour ranks as a failure for Dravid: that assessment is based on his performance at the helm of the team.

Dravid's strength, perhaps, is that he is a coach's captain - and up front, let's discount hysterical media reports that suggest he is under Greg Chappell's thumb, or foot, or whatever body part.

Captains have to work in tandem with coaches; that is what coaches are there for, and the best captains have invariably been the ones that have established great working relationships with the coach du jour (think Border-Simpson; Ponting-Buchanan; Woolmer-Cronje.)

A coach, though, is strictly back-room. He can strategize till the cows come home - but 50 per cent of all that pre-game strategy gets thrown out the window within the first 15 minutes of a session getting under way.

From that point on, it is all up to the captain; it is he who has to react to the changes in tempo of the game; who has to think on his feet and come up with alternate strategies; who has to have a feel for the game, ball by ball, over by over; to spot the moment when his team has the sliver of an opportunity, and to drive it home ruthlessly.

In this respect, on this tour, Dravid wasn't quite all there. He preferred to play it by the book, and it cost the team: on day two at Kingsmead, for instance, when South Africa, already badly battered at the Wanderers, had slumped to 257/8 at the end of day one, but was allowed to recover to 328. If the VRV Singh slog fest at the Wanderers is being celebrated for having swung the momentum of the first Test India's way, then the second morning as evidently swung the pendulum in reverse.

In the second innings of that same Test, SA was down and almost out on 143/6 - and again, opportunity beckoned. In vain, as it turned out: bowlers were rotated by the book, the field was set by the book, and for the second time in one Test, the home side was given the keys to jail - and India lost a Test it could/should have won.

An apology of sorts could be made, perhaps, by claiming that the bowlers didn't bowl the right lines, or there were misfields, or whatever - but what explanation, what excuse, can there be for session two, day four, Test three?

It was the series decider. India was sitting on a crucial 41 run lead. At lunch, India was 73/2 or, more to the point, 114/2, and in a position to put the boot in.

All the hard work, all the gains, were undone in 15 bizarre overs that saw Dravid and Tendulkar completely strokeless. Before the two got together, there were visible signs of worry, if not outright panic, in the Proteas ranks; by the time the two batsmen were done with their exercise in the inexplicable, the fielding side was buzzing, the bowlers who had been knocked off line and length earlier had rediscovered their radar, and there really was only one result possible from there on.

Dravid the batsman will have his ups and downs - and in his case, it is usually more ups than downs; it is for his captaincy, for his inability to recognize the moment and to seize it with both hands, that he needs to be judged on this tour; and on that score, history will judge him a failure.

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