Suresh Raina: The Player Chappell & Dravid created
Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Suresh Raina retired from international cricket on the 73rd anniversary of India’s independence from British rule. They marked an era in India’s limited overs history. Much has been written about Dhoni. This essay outlines the contours of that era and argues that Suresh Raina the limited overs batsman was invented on Greg Chappell and Rahul Dravid’s drawing board.
Among those paying tributes to Dhoni’s contribution to the game was Greg Chappell. Chappell’s tenure as the Indian head coach was controversial. However, as Karthik Krishnaswamy observed recently at ESPNCricinfo, “while one group of players has been unsparingly critical of Chappell's methods, other prominent voices - Anil Kumble, Yuvraj Singh, MS Dhoni, and above all Rahul Dravid - have largely stayed silent on the matter. Irfan Pathan has rejected, on multiple occasions, the widely held notion that Chappell was responsible for his decline as a swing bowler after a promising start to his career. Pathan was one of a group of younger players heavily backed by Chappell, alongside Yuvraj, Dhoni (whose leadership potential Chappell was one of the first to spot) and Suresh Raina.”
Raina, who won 226 ODI caps and 18 Test caps for India, carved out a role in the Indian middle order along the lines established during the Chappell/Dravid years. Chappell gave an example of one such role in his tribute to MS Dhoni. More generally, it was under Chappell that India first began to pay close attention to the details of how the ODI batting order needed to function from positions 4 to 8. By 2005, this focus had been commonplace in some of the top teams like South Africa, Australia and Pakistan, but India were still committed to the more traditional top-heavy line-up which followed from the tactical insight of the early 1990s which said that the best players should face as many deliveries as possible. Dhoni was crucial to this change because he offered India something which they had not had since Kapil Dev - a two-skilled player who could provide power in the middle-order. Since 2005, the Indian ODI batting from number 4 onwards has consistently been built via a combination of anchors and marauders. The attention to the details about roles extended beyond the middle order to the bowling, fielding positions and the like.
Raina developed his game as a marauder. He invariably followed a prolific top four which included Tendulkar, Sehwag, Kohli, Yuvraj Singh, Dravid, Dhawan, Gambhir and Rohit Sharma, and batted alongside Dhoni who became the master anchor. This meant that Raina cultivated the ability to take more risks earlier in his innings. This allowed the anchor to shut the opposition out from the other end without subduing India’s scoring rate.
The chart above shows a comparison of the scoring rates achieved by Raina, Yuvraj and Dhoni by the nth ball of their innings. It demonstrates Raina’s early acceleration. With today’s eyes we can see the value of the approach Raina cultivated quite easily. We are used to the Indian team being masterful in the middle overs either when batting first or chasing. We are used to seeing Indian middle order batsmen taking calculated risks, “picking their spot” as commentators often like to say, and scoring boundaries under the powerplay regulations.
But this was not always the case. Before 2005, the conventional wisdom for India’s limited overs middle order batsman dictated that they occupy the crease and keep wickets in hand. In the table above, the effects of this approach are evident in the record of Hemang Badani, Dinesh Mongia and Mohammad Kaif. All three approached their innings cautiously despite the fact that Rahul Dravid was already there as a technically supreme, highly consistent middle order anchor. Chappell’s great innovation was to use Raina, Yuvraj and Dhoni as foils to Dravid in the Indian middle-order of the mid-2000s. When Dravid eventually stopped playing ODI cricket, MS Dhoni took over the anchoring role. At their peak, both Yuvraj Singh and MS Dhoni would undertake the anchoring role. After the 2015 World Cup, when India actively sought out power hitting ability for their middle order, Dhoni and Kohli took on the anchoring role.
This division of duties meant that Raina took risks earlier in his innings compared to Dhoni and Yuvraj. It is no surprise that at positions 4-7, while Dhoni played an innings which lasted at least 80 balls once every 10.5 innings, Dravid did it once every 5 innings, and Yuvraj did it once every 10.6 innings, only 1 in 24.8 of Raina’s innings lasted 80 balls or more.
Before 2005, this would have been seen as evidence of Raina’s impetuosity and inconsistency. Raina played 226 times for India and returned an average of 35 and scoring rate of 93.5 runs per 100 balls. This is evidence of the fact that Raina was fulfilling a role and cultivated his game accordingly. The technical changes he must have made to his batting to master the requirements of this ODI role may have had an impact on his prospects as a Test player. As the history of cricket shows, the kind of universal adaptability demonstrated by AB de Villiers or Sachin Tendulkar is given to only the rarest of successful international cricketers.
England had Neil Fairbrother in the 1980s, South Africa had Jonty Rhodes in the 90s, and Australia had Andrew Symonds in the 2000s. Suresh Raina was India’s first true blue specialist ODI batsman. His role had been brilliantly carved out for him by the Indian team management. Someone in an ODI middle order has to take risks and score quickly to enable someone else to drop anchor. Traditionally, the responsibility for pushing the score along in the middle overs belongs to the well-set batsman in the top three or four. But when the top four have been dismissed, the additional scoring ballast provided by a player who has Suresh Raina’s role can mean the difference between a below par score and a competitive one.
With the retirement of Suresh Raina and MS Dhoni, the Indian ODI side built by Greg Chappell and Rahul Dravid in that formative period of 2005-07 has been retired in one sense. But in a deeper sense, its lessons about offering well-defined, specific roles to different players in the XI have well and truly taken root in the Indian limited overs setup. The consequence of this is that India have consistently been among the two or three best teams in the world during this period.