Rahane’s Gentle Goodbye

Through his long and successful cricket career that finally came to an end on July 30, it was the art of waiting that Ajinkya Rahane mastered better than anyone else, even more than his more storied colleagues. As a junior cricketer, he cherished and perfected waiting for the bad ball to put away, hours spent leaving the good ones under the harsh Bombay sun. There was then the wait for his talent to be noticed from among the thousands, even millions of maidan boys and break into the first-class set-up.

Usually, for a cricketer as talented as Rahane, that’s where the wait to prove one’s worth usually ends. But for Rahane, this is where the unusual amount of waiting really began – periods that would have crushed a less patient man. The wait to stake a claim in India’s batting order, stacked with legends from the previous era during his early days. Once the likes of VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid retired and he was picked in the wider Test squad, the longer wait was warming the bench during several Test tours. A record number, that ‘several’.

Suddenly, albeit momentarily, the wait ended when he was given a chance against Australia in Delhi in the March of 2013, well after his contemporaries – Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara – had already established themselves in the Test top-order. Scores of 7 and 1 on debut – the second low-score to a rash, un-Rahane like shot – ensured he was shelved again, until Sachin Tendulkar retired from international cricket later that year.

The return came in South Africa in India’s first overseas assignment without Tendulkar in a quarter of a century, the tour traditionally being a graveyard for Indian batters. But Rahane showed he could be trusted on fast tracks, with innings of 51 not out and 96 in the second Test in Durban. The missed hundred at Kingsmead, luckily, didn’t have to wait too long, for in February of 2014 he struck his maiden ton in Wellington, New Zealand.

The wait to establish himself may have ended, but now began the wait to excel and become a star, which he did slowly, surely, patiently, over the next seven peak years or so, with more overseas hundreds than three-figure marks on the batting-friendly wickets at home – the mark of true quality. Eight of Rahane’s 12 hundreds were notched in fiery conditions away from India, perhaps the most iconic of which was the counter-attacking 103 at Lord’s in 2014, a knock that eventually led to a historic win in the home of cricket. But the wait for his greatest moment in international cricket, spread over a long and gruelling tour of Australia in 2020-21 (the Covid tour), was ushered in in radically strange circumstances.

When the tour began, Kohli was India’s captain, backroom leader and star batsman, all rolled into one. Rahane would assume each of those positions after the first Test in Adelaide, where India was rolled out for just 36 runs in the second innings, following which Kohli left the tour for the birth of his first child. The following Test was in Melbourne, where stand-in captain Rahane set the tone for the rest of the series with a sparkling hundred and a series-levelling win. By the time the Indian squad had limped to the fifth and final Test in Brisbane, with more than half their squad unable to take the field for one reason or the other, Rahane had the challenge of a lifetime ahead of him.

He conquered it with his astute strategies and a set of never-say-die second-stringers, ensuring a series win on a ground that Australia hadn’t lost on for over three decades. This improbable feat alone should have assured Rahane’s place among the all-time greats of Indian cricket, or at least in the playing eleven for a long time to come, given he was in his early 30s and in the prime of his life. But by the time the very next Test series against England began in Chennai, Kohli returned as captain and once again, Rahane was away from the limelight, barely holding down his position as a middle-order bat over the next two years.

There was one final quasi-hurrah in the final of the World Test Championships at the Oval in 2023, where he alone kept India in the contest with a fighting 89 in the first innings. But after that loss, Rahane played only two more Tests, the last of them in Trinidad in mid-2023. Here began the most annoying of waits in his career, the one to stage an unlikely comeback, even as the country’s cricket administration focussed on a younger and fitter Test side, cutting loose the legendary likes of Kohli, R Ashwin and Rohit Sharma along the way. In the end, though, that wait simply ran out.