Suresh Raina | King Cricket https://www.kingcricket.co.uk Independent and irreverent cricket writing Thu, 27 Apr 2023 09:19:28 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.3 https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-kc_400x400-32x32.png Suresh Raina | King Cricket https://www.kingcricket.co.uk 32 32 Grim final Tests: 8 players who went out on a massive low https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/grim-final-tests-8-players-who-went-out-on-a-massive-low/2023/04/27/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/grim-final-tests-8-players-who-went-out-on-a-massive-low/2023/04/27/#comments Thu, 27 Apr 2023 09:09:23 +0000 https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=28349 6 minute read Every player wants to go out on a high, but few actually do. Most topple forwards and face-plant when attempting to bow out in style. And that’s what life’s about. You do your best for a bit and then the ending’s probably going to be a little bit of a

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6 minute read

Every player wants to go out on a high, but few actually do. Most topple forwards and face-plant when attempting to bow out in style. And that’s what life’s about. You do your best for a bit and then the ending’s probably going to be a little bit of a mess.

Sport is obsessed with great players going out in a blaze of glory; one final flash of genius before they swap their boots for slippers.

But while it can happen, the value of a ‘perfect’ ending is questionable anyway. What might seem like an immaculate full stop generally also brings with it the shadow of a question mark. Perhaps the player in question should have carried on just a little bit longer. And why is the memory of a final match any more significant than memories of all the other matches anyway? It’s all history.

In any case, the greatest final Test has already been and gone, so why bother trying to compete?

Glorious final Tests

Alastair Cook finished with a ton. Jason Gillespie exited with an unlikely double century. Muttiah Muralitharan secured victory and his 800th Test wicket with his final delivery. Going further back, Vijay Merchant’s final two Test innings were 128 and 154 (albeit five years apart), while Seymour Nurse finished with three hundreds in his last six innings, vacating the stage with 258 against New Zealand.

But none of these are in the same league as Enid Bakewell.

Bakewell won her final Test for England, against the West Indies, after taking 10-75. She made 68 opening the batting in the first innings and made an unbeaten 112 in the second out of a total of 164. That’s 68.29% of the runs, which is more than even Charles Bannerman managed.

As Test performances go, it’s probably the best one.

So raise your hands, concede this one, and just play on. Play on until they’re forced to drag you from the field because you’ve turned into a massive great anchor holding the rest of the team back.

Paul Collingwood averaged 13.83 in his final series, but won the Ashes. That seems a good way to go out. He certainly seemed pretty pleased with it.

Inglorious final Tests

Before we get into this, let’s just quickly address the most immediately obvious final Test downer: Don Bradman’s duck.

To quickly sum up, the Don went into his final Test with an average of over 100 and was bowled second ball, which brought his average down into double figures.

This is, on the face of it, not an especially glorious finish – but think of it in terms of the story and the drama. Don Bradman started and ended this innings as the most consistently successful batter Test cricket has seen and so a duck was an incredibly big deal. Throw in the fact that it prevented him becoming the only player to average over 100 and this is pretty much the most famous innings of all time.

That is, in its own way, going out on a high. A three-figure average would have been an incredible feat, but 99.94 is barely less incredible and packs a far more powerful emotional hit.

1. Adam Voges, Australia

This is how you end on a downer. Briefly, during his innings of 239 against New Zealand in 2016, Adam Voges’ Test average exceeded Bradman’s. Then he was dismissed and over the course of the next half dozen Tests, that average went into a flat spin before concussion in a domestic match provided a timely reason for ejecting him.

Voges finished with a golden duck (at which point Australia were 8-4) and then 2 against South Africa in his 20th and final Test, his average dropping from 67.40 to 61.87 in the process. Australia were bowled out for 85 on the first day and suffered an innings defeat.

> Hot streaks: Test batters who hit a prolonged purple patch

2. Suresh Raina, India

What’s worse than a duck? A pair. Suresh Raina was never the most successful Test batter, but the contrasts in his final match were brutal. After Australia made 572-7 declared, India responded with 475. Australia declared again in the second innings but couldn’t bowl India out.

Raina’s contributions were a golden duck and a duck. His previous innings, against New Zealand, had also been a duck. All in all, he failed to score in five of his final seven innings. This is how to finish a Test career: unequivocally.

> Best of the blobs: Eight of Test cricket’s finest duck-makers

3. Geraint Jones, England

What’s worse than a pair? A pair while losing the Ashes, even though it’s only the third Test. Geraint Jones was picked as England wicketkeeper in large part for his batting, but bowed out with a pair in Perth in 2006, securing it either side of Australia’s 527-5 declared – an innings that included a 57-ball hundred from his opposite number, Adam Gilchrist. Jones was run out by Ricky Ponting in his final innings off a ball where he could quite easily have been given LBW.

4. Simon Katich, Australia

New Zealand’s Chris Martin is pretty much the patron saint of ducks. It was therefore fitting that in his final Test innings he should fall below even his own rock bottom standards by getting run out without even facing a ball. However, given Martin’s record, that wasn’t actually an especially ignominious finish for a man who ultimately went out with five zeros on the trot if you include not outs. You didn’t expect runs from Chris Martin. That most definitely wasn’t what he was there for.

Simon Katich though? He was an opening batter. That gives his final Test diamond duck far greater weight, even if he did go on to make 43 later in the match. Because really you could argue that first innings, first over dismissal shaped the 2010 Adelaide Test and to some extent the series.

Katich was run out by Jonathan Trott off the fourth ball of the match. James Anderson then dismissed Ricky Ponting next ball and Australia’s 245 proved entirely inadequate as England racked up 620-5 en route to an innings victory.

5. Sohag Gazi, Bangladesh

What of the bowlers though? Where a bad final match for a batter is over in the blink of an eye, there is something uniquely grim about the equivalent experience for a Test bowler.

In February 2014, Sohag Gazi went into what would be his final Test having taken 2-207 across his previous two matches. He duly returned figures of 1-181 off 48 overs in the first innings and 1-87 off 18.5 overs in the second. Rather capping things off, on a pitch on which Kumar Sangakkara was able to make 424 runs on his own, Gazi batted once and made a golden duck.

6. Arshad Ayub, India

Gazi did at least take a wicket though. In December 1989, Indian off-spinner Arshad Ayub trunded in for 0-182 from 49 overs against Pakistan. That performance came after returns of 0-81 and 0-37 in his penultimate Test.

7. Chuck Fleetwood-Smith, Australia

As poor final Tests go, Chuck Fleetwood-Smith’s is perhaps the benchmark. His innings figures of 1-298 in England’s 903-7 declared remain the most expensive in Test history.

There’s a dash of batting to throw into the mix too, as you’d expect from a man who supposedly once said, “If you can’t be the best batsman in the world, you might as well be the worst.”

Fleetwood-Smith was the last man dismissed in Australia’s second innings when England secured victory by an innings and 579 runs. He made a duck.

8. Denis Compton

Compton’s final Test was the fifth Test against South Africa at Port Elizabeth in 1957. While he finished his career with an average of over 50, Compton made a two-ball duck in the first innings and 5 in the second innings.

That would be pretty bad in itself, but it was only really in keeping with a much broader downer. Defeat meant a tied series after England had won the first two Tests and drawn the third, and this match in particular was a weird combination of dreariness and farce. The pitch had been relaid with soil from Durban but it hadn’t properly settled and this meant the action was defined by a great many grub-hunters and pea-rollers. This resulted in the slowest Test in history with a scoring at a rate of 1.40 runs per six balls (538 runs from 287.5 eight-ball overs).

A blaze of glory? Denis Compton went out in a blaze of, “Ah stuff this, there must be something better I could be doing with my life.”

We couldn’t write these sorts of features without the priceless gift of time. Actually, not priceless, because the people who are backing our Patreon campaign quite literally buy us the time. You can buy us more time and yourself more King Cricket features here.

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Suresh Raina v England – what this means for the World Cup https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-v-england-what-this-means-for-the-world-cup/2014/08/27/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-v-england-what-this-means-for-the-world-cup/2014/08/27/#comments Wed, 27 Aug 2014 18:14:02 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=12373 2 minute read Before today, Suresh Raina had made three ODI hundreds in 193 matches. He made them against Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong. But Raina bats in the middle order, so that doesn’t tell us a lot. Let’s look at fifties instead. Against New Zealand, he has one in 11 innings;

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2 minute readBefore today, Suresh Raina had made three ODI hundreds in 193 matches. He made them against Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Hong Kong.

But Raina bats in the middle order, so that doesn’t tell us a lot. Let’s look at fifties instead.

Against New Zealand, he has one in 11 innings; against Pakistan, one in 14; against South Africa, one in 11; against West Indies, one in 26 and against England 12 in 26, including six of his top ten one-day scores.

At this point we have to ask ourselves whether there’s something he particularly likes about a tired white ball delivered at fast-medium pace.

Let’s look at his strike rates against each of today’s bowlers.

  • Anderson: 25 off 12 balls – 208.33
  • Woakes: 23 off 11 – 209.09
  • Jordan: 13 off 15 – 86.66
  • Stokes: 20 off 10 – 200
  • Tredwell: 19 off 27 – 70.37

Oddly, Jordan’s efforts to become the world’s foremost ‘angling down the leg side’ bowler probably saved him.

Extrapolation’s what you need

One-day cricket in England is a bit different because you get more movement early on. However, the passages of play later on – once the ball stops doing owt – aren’t so dissimilar from what might be expected in Australia come the World Cup. If anything, Australian conditions merely mean a greater proportion of those sorts of overs.

In today’s match, England did the early, irrelevant bit well and then the later, relevant bit shitly. Their bowling simply isn’t tall enough, fast enough, slow enough or weird enough to keep batsmen guessing on a flat pitch. It’s samey. Four fast-medium right-armers is two – if not three – too many.

Is this the end of the world (cup campaign)?

Steven Finn’s taller and often quicker; Stuart Broad will be back to offer the same qualities; Harry Gurney’s a left-armer, should he prove reliable; and Ravi Bopara’s neither-one-thing-nor-the-other wobblery does offer something different. There are always options that would desameyise a bowling attack.

As for the batting, England remain poor chasers of anything over 250, which is all the more reason to get the bowling right.

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Ajinkya Rahane v Suresh Raina https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/ajinkya-rahane-v-suresh-raina/2014/07/18/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/ajinkya-rahane-v-suresh-raina/2014/07/18/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2014 23:08:07 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=12166 2 minute read Okay, turns out we do have something else to say. It’s to do with who’s a good batsman. We don’t want this to become a Suresh Raina bashing thing, because we’ve a certain amount of time for him. He does certain things better than almost anyone. The issue is that

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2 minute readOkay, turns out we do have something else to say. It’s to do with who’s a good batsman.

We don’t want this to become a Suresh Raina bashing thing, because we’ve a certain amount of time for him. He does certain things better than almost anyone. The issue is that many people confuse ‘certain things’ with ‘everything’.

You may not remember, but Suresh Raina played each of the Test matches the last time India toured England in 2011. We have no idea how this happened. If you slaved away in a lab, you’d do well to engineer a worse Test batsman for English conditions than Suresh Raina.

Here are his scores from that 2011 series. The miracle is that he made a fifty:

0, 78, 12, 1, 4, 10, 0 and 0.

If he didn’t nick one, you just bounced him out. It was easy, as the scores suggest. There’s no shame in that, because he shouldn’t have been playing in the first place. His selection was the crime, not his batting.

So who should have been playing? Well, Rahane, obviously. He too might have been crap, but at least he had a case for being there. In the 2010-11 season, Rahane scored 1,003 first-class runs in nine matches at an average of 83.58, making five hundreds. That same season, Raina made 144 runs in five matches at 20.57. He made one fifty.

Yeah, yeah, yeah – statistics and all that. But what you have to remember is that these statistics only support what is blatantly obvious to everyone: Ajinkya Rahane is a batsman who can adapt to different situations and different conditions, whereas Suresh Raina does ‘certain things’ very well.

Last time around, India picked a load of celebrities and got the shit kicked out of them. This time they’ve picked some proper cricketers and prepared them properly too. It is already a far better series.

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Suresh Raina is getting nowhere fast https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-is-getting-nowhere-fast/2011/10/24/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-is-getting-nowhere-fast/2011/10/24/#comments Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:25:24 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=7498 2 minute read You’d think you’d be more convinced about a player after he’d hit 80 off 62 balls in a one-day match. At worst, you’d think you’d feel the same about him. Yet somehow Suresh Raina actually managed to erode our confidence in him. This despite the fact that we said India

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2 minute readYou’d think you’d be more convinced about a player after he’d hit 80 off 62 balls in a one-day match. At worst, you’d think you’d feel the same about him. Yet somehow Suresh Raina actually managed to erode our confidence in him. This despite the fact that we said India might be better off picking 10 players during their last Test series.

Raina in one-day cricket

Before we continue, let’s be clear that we have few qualms about Raina as a one-day player. If a World XI were playing in India (and where else would it be playing) he’d be in our team were we for some inexplicable reason made chief selector.

But that’s very much our point. He’s not proving anything with innings like the one yesterday against England. Everyone knows he can play like that in that situation. That isn’t news.

Watching him in England, it seemed to us that he had Test ambitions. Although he struggled, knee-jerk England media suggestions that he ‘didn’t care’ were well wide of the mark in our eyes. Struggling for runs and losing matches, he retained his enthusiasm admirably. However, if he is bothered about Test cricket, there are some things he needs to address.

Watch them ribs

Suresh Raina has to learn to cope with deliveries aimed at his body on bouncier pitches. We’re deliberately trying to make a distinction between ‘short-pitched bowling’ and ‘deliveries that pass above the waist’ there.

To say Raina is weak against the short ball is misleading, because when it pitches short, he’s fine. It’s when the ball’s fuller yet still gets up when he looks like a member of the crowd who’s grabbed a helmet and bat and slipped onto the field of play.

He can’t really do anything to answer this question in India. Even if the pitches don’t turn as much as some people choose to imagine, they are low-bouncing. A bowler aiming at the body has to pitch the ball sufficiently short that the batsman has plenty of time to react. Trying to prove you can play the short ball in one-day matches in India is like trying to acclimatise to extreme heat by coming to England for the summer.

Keeping cool

Speaking of heat, that’s how Virat Kohli enhanced his Test case where Raina harmed his – he kept his cool. Kohli doesn’t mind trawling his vocabulary for some robust adjectives when chatting to the bowlers, but his batting is totally controlled. Raina’s isn’t.

The more England got stuck into Raina, the more frenetic he got. It was like he was careering down a steep hill on a bike with no brakes. Yes, he was gaining momentum, but there was only one way it was going to end. The fact that Steven Finn lost his cool in even more embarrassing fashion drew attention away from Raina’s own internal meltdown, but it still happened.

Raina can continue to enjoy a rather pleasant Groundhog Day in one-day cricket if he so chooses, but if he does want something more, he should look to Kohli. Raina landed a few blows, but Kohli got the job done – that’s the difference.

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India’s stellar batting line-up https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/indias-stellar-batting-line-up/2011/08/11/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/indias-stellar-batting-line-up/2011/08/11/#comments Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:32:40 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=7116 2 minute read So far, it’s been looking a bit Stella – stronger than most, but you’d really rather have something else if at all possible. That said, context is everything in cricket and batting hasn’t been all that easy this summer. England’s bowling has generally been very good, but there have been

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2 minute readWell at least Anderson didn't- balls!

So far, it’s been looking a bit Stella – stronger than most, but you’d really rather have something else if at all possible.

That said, context is everything in cricket and batting hasn’t been all that easy this summer. England’s bowling has generally been very good, but there have been helpful conditions as well. To some degree, India’s batting looks worse simply because England have scored more runs – for which the Indian bowlers have to take quite a lot of the blame.

That said, for every peachy delivery that’s got rid of Dravid, someone else has done something demented. It was VVS Laxman’s turn yesterday. He played a shot that we immediately branded as being ‘fully spasticated’. That’s just cricket though. It’s half about outplaying your opponent and half about making fewer balls-ups.

Less than stellar

The biggest culprit has been Suresh Raina, of course. If India had picked a fifth bowler instead of him, they might have fared a damn sight better. They wouldn’t have lost any runs and they might not have suffered such flagging bowlers in the second innings. England went from 62-5 to 269-6 in the first Test and the second Test saw unremitting flaggery from those running in.

To be honest, if they’d replaced Raina with no-one whatsoever – just a blank space – India’s batting would have looked better. His own bowling in England’s second innings at Trent Bridge created context – it made batting look like a piece of piss. However, when India batted, we saw that batting was actually pretty tricky.

Raina’s bowling was bad enough to take the gloss off Dravid, Laxman and Tendulkar. Now that’s bad.

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Suresh Raina and the short ball https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-and-the-short-ball/2011/08/03/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-and-the-short-ball/2011/08/03/#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:03:14 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=7074 < 1 minute read Dear Short Ball, I would be most grateful if you would come round later on. I will pull out all the stops for you. You can sit in my armchair. I will bring you drinks. I even have some of your favourite cake. Don’t worry about replying. All of this

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< 1 minute read

Dear Short Ball,

I would be most grateful if you would come round later on. I will pull out all the stops for you. You can sit in my armchair. I will bring you drinks. I even have some of your favourite cake.

Don’t worry about replying. All of this is no trouble at all.

Looking forward to seeing you,

Suresh

No-one invites the short ball quite like Suresh Raina. We don’t know if we’ve ever seen a professional batsman play short-pitched bowling so consistently badly as he did during his brief stay at the crease in the second innings at Trent Bridge.

Surely that was some sort of freakish one-off? The guy’s played 153 international matches, after all. No-one – particularly someone who’s barely five feet tall – could possibly have reached that level while being so jaw-droppingly incompetent at such a major aspect of batting.

That’s not a joke and it’s barely rhetoric. He couldn’t be that bad, could he?

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Suresh Raina makes a good career move https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-makes-a-good-career-move/2010/05/02/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-makes-a-good-career-move/2010/05/02/#comments Sun, 02 May 2010 17:14:52 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=4283 < 1 minute read Suresh Raina hit the first Twenty20 international hundred for India. He’ll do well out of that, you’d think. We like Suresh Raina. We like the fact that he plays across the line into the off side. That seems to us to be the most effective way of making yourself look

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< 1 minute readSuresh Raina's got a face onSuresh Raina hit the first Twenty20 international hundred for India. He’ll do well out of that, you’d think.

We like Suresh Raina. We like the fact that he plays across the line into the off side. That seems to us to be the most effective way of making yourself look like a class batsman. He also enjoys a healthy measure of luckybastardom. We rarely see him bat without miraculously surving an atrocious skier at some point.

If we do have any misgivings, they’re to do with his appearance. He’s a pretty smiley guy, which is good, but when he doesn’t smile, there’s something awfully suspicious about that short top lip and that hair cut.

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Suresh Raina was there too https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-was-there-too/2008/06/27/ https://www.kingcricket.co.uk/suresh-raina-was-there-too/2008/06/27/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:58:47 +0000 http://www.kingcricket.co.uk/?p=476 < 1 minute read With Virender Sehwag doing some spectacular repairs to his surprisingly ordinary one-day record, it’s easy to overlook his juvenile, boundary-hitting accomplice, Suresh Raina. Sehwag followed his 44 ball 78 against the might of Hong Kong with a 95-ball 119 against Pakistan’s increasingly mediocre attack. Suresh Raina took 68 balls to

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< 1 minute readSuresh Raina - looks like a complete chump, bats like a dreamWith Virender Sehwag doing some spectacular repairs to his surprisingly ordinary one-day record, it’s easy to overlook his juvenile, boundary-hitting accomplice, Suresh Raina.

Sehwag followed his 44 ball 78 against the might of Hong Kong with a 95-ball 119 against Pakistan’s increasingly mediocre attack. Suresh Raina took 68 balls to hit 101 against Hong Kong and kept his eye in with 84 off 69 balls yesterday.

We liked what we saw of Suresh Raina when England toured India a couple of years ago. He was 19 at the time and we thought him organised, composed and dynamic as well as loads of other adjectives which we haven’t really thought about, but which make it sound like we know what we’re talking about.

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