Gazing out from the team photos under his yellow cap, there is something ingenuous about Raina’s face. Give the image a sepia tint and he could be a man from a more innocent age, a cavalier unhinged by the stinking rot of his times.
Maybe, it’s this demeanour that has prompted most of us to magnifying his shortcomings than his strengths. The intrinsic non-nonchalance of his cover-drive is almost lost in those innocuous half-defensive postures when dealing with short-pitch deliveries, a fatal weakness that has checked his Test career.
Maybe, he still writhes in discomfort in the flannels of white, but in coloured bottoms, whether bleeding blue or flaming yellow, his diminutive frame gathers bulk, both literally and figuratively.
The assigned duties are dissimilar. In the blues, he is a finisher-designate, either to put the icing on cake baked by the top-order batsmen or to undertake a rapid heist. There isn’t the luxury of time or circumspection as the more privileged men before him, though more than once he has expressed his desire to bat up the order.
For CSK, he has been the unassuming enforcer, mostly immune to the vagaries of form, quietly going about with his job, amidst a bunch of hard-nuts, muggers, brawlers and flawed geniuses. But more often than not his efforts are lost in the flash of Murali Vijay, the Antipodean derring-do of Mike Hussey or the charisma of MS Dhoni.
It’s annoying at the best of times, and often there is a twitch of eyebrows when one is reminded that Raina is the leading run-getter in IPL. In a sense it’s strange, for the hype that was attached to his prodigy days has drastically subsided.
The numbers—2613 runs in 88 innings at 34.84—as usual doesn’t portray the full picture, for their sheer inability to convey the context. That is the cross he has to bear.
The hundred might still not tick all the boxes; might not be his most influential IPL innings; nor would it elevate him to IPL immortality, but it would go a long way in shedding the stereotype that has been long attached to him—an underachieving flat-track bully, capable of fleeting brilliance but not sustained aggro. Hence, this has been a sort of coming-of-age knock for him, only that he should produce more of these, for he, more than anyone else, seems a yard away from scrutiny.
Now, if Photoshop-equipped, brush his cherub-face with a stroke of grey, and suddenly there is the battle-scarred grimace of a man at ease with his image.
