The power of yellow and Suresh Raina’s fallibility in blue

OSMAN SAMIUDDIN, Wisden India

Suresh Raina has not had a bad international career. He has not set the Test scene alight but his 50-over and 20-over canvases are impressive enough. Until he was dropped from India’s ODI side earlier this year in New Zealand, he was a nearpermanent feature of that format. His troubles against the short ball have restricted his Test career, but in any case his international career is far from over.

But does it not feel that he somehow does not seem as complete, as formidable, in the blue of India as he does in the yellow of Chennai Super Kings? When you see Raina in the Indian Premier League, you do not see India’s Raina. This one carries around him a sense of earned security and assuredness, an athlete comfortable with whatever gifts he has been given and the role in which he has to deploy them.

Other batsmen have been more luminescent in the IPL, but has any batsman embodied it as much as Raina? Has any batsman been so enhanced by the confidence the league gives, and at the same time been so lulled by the care-lessness it allows to creep in? Raina is comfortably a giant of the league, and, in a transient environment, a mainstay. Chennai’s opening match of the Pepsi IPL 2014 was his 100th IPL game, the first man to the mark. Only Gautam Gambhir has more fifties than him and, given their recent paths, it will be no surprise if Raina has overtaken him before the season is out.

He is also a two-time league winner and as much the on-field face of Chennai as Mahendra Singh Dhoni, the captain, and Stephen Fleming, the coach. All this is what prompted a journalist to say, after Chennai’s win over Delhi, that this is the time of the year when Raina does nothing wrong at all. Raina had just helped Chennai get their season off to a start.

His 56 was nothing more and nothing less than what was expected. His smart sense of placement took advantage of a vast outfield, picking up seven doubles. When he needed to, he found the boundary, mixing newer strokes with older, orthodox ones. Overall was the unmistakable impression that he bats lighter, with lesser burden, for Chennai than India. That he bats at three for them, a position generally assigned to the team’s best batsman, probably helps.

It is where, he said, he feels comfortable. “I bat No.3 here and if you look at my ODI record [for India] I bat five, six, or seven. “I have a freedom to bat in Twenty20. I know I can go after six overs and still have 14 overs. That is the strength of my batting here over the last 6-7 years.”