Ajinkya Rahane, an accidental captain, holds a rare cricket record that even MS Dhoni, Virat Kohli & Sachin Tendulkar couldn't match

Ajinkya Rahane retired today from international cricket today. The Mumbai batter, all of 36 now, put out a video on social media this morning announcing he's done with the India cap for good, Test, ODI, T20I, everything. "Cap number 278, signing off," he wrote, and just like that, a career that began in 2011 came full circle.

Most tributes pouring in today will talk about the 112 at the MCG in the middle of the 2020-21 Adelaide horror show, or the six-year wait he endured just to get a Test debut. Fair enough, those moments deserve every bit of the praise. But scroll past the sentimental posts and there's a number sitting quietly in Ajinkya Rahane's file that almost nobody led India as often as him, yet somehow, nobody has matched.

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He never lost. Not once. Not in a Test, not in an ODI, in whatever few games he got to lead the side.

Ajikya Rahane's Record: Numbers Nobody's Talking About

Rahane captained India six times in Test cricket, four wins, two draws, zero defeats. Add the ODIs, three matches during a 2015 tour of Zimbabwe when MS Dhoni was rested, and it's three wins out of three. A hundred percent strike rate with the toss coin in hand, if you want to put a figure on it.

Compare that to the men whose shadows Rahane spent most of his career standing in. MS Dhoni, arguably India's most successful captain ever, still walked off the field beaten plenty of times, a whitewash in England in 2011, another in Australia months later.

Virat Kohli, for all his aggression and 40-plus Test wins as skipper, lost his fair share too, including that heartbreaking World Test Championship final.

And Sachin Tendulkar? His captaincy stint is practically cricket folklore for the wrong reasons, four wins from 25 Tests, just 23 from 73 ODIs, a win percentage barely scraping past 30. The greatest batter to ever hold a bat simply couldn't get the leadership numbers to add up.

Rahane, hardly ever trusted with the armband, somehow never had to face that discomfort.

Ajinkya Rahane's Captaincy Born Out Of Emergency, Not Choice

There's an irony here worth sitting with. Rahane was never groomed to lead India. He got the job almost by accident every single time, standing in when Kohli picked up an injury in 2017, when Kohli flew home for the birth of his daughter in the middle of the Border-Gavaskar series, when Dhoni needed a breather on a low-stakes Zimbabwe tour. Every single time, he was the fill-in, the guy keeping the seat warm.

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And every single time, the team walked away either winning or refusing to lose.

The Brisbane Test remains the crown jewel of that run, India, missing half their first-choice bowling attack, chasing down 328 to end Australia's 32-year unbeaten streak at the Gabba, with Rahane holding the fort as captain for that entire series after the Adelaide 36 all-out disaster. It's still spoken about as one of the greatest overseas Test series wins in Indian cricket history, and it happened on Rahane's watch, not Kohli's.

A Record That Was Always Going To Be Overlooked

Part of why this stat has flown under the radar is simple, six Tests and three ODIs is a small sample size next to Dhoni's 60 Tests or Kohli's 68 as captain. Critics point out, fairly, that leading a side for a handful of matches is a different beast altogether from carrying that burden for years on end, series after series, tour after tour.

But cricket has always had room for both kinds of records, the marathon and the perfect sprint. Rahane's sprint, however short, stayed spotless.

He retires today with 85 Tests, over 5,000 Test runs, 12 centuries, and a Border-Gavaskar Trophy story that Indian cricket fans will retell for decades. Somewhere in that story, quietly, sits a captaincy record that the biggest names in the sport's history in this country simply never got to have.

Ajinkya, the name itself means "unbeatable" in Marathi. As a captain, at least, he lived up to every letter of it.