At ‘home venue’, Suresh Raina hopes to reboot career

THE LAST time Suresh Raina played in a T20 fixture at Kanpur’s Green Park Stadium, he was adjudged Man-of-the-Match. Leading his IPL franchise, the Gujarat Lions against the Mumbai Indians, Raina scored a brisk half-century to help his side pull off a stunning chase. Raina loves T20 cricket, more specifically, the IPL. This is the tournament that has build his reputation as one of the cleanest and the fiercest strikers in the game. More specifically, he is one of the only two players to notch up more than 4000 runs in the IPL. Eight months since that heist, Raina is back at the venue, this time in his blue team India jersey. Drafted in India’s squad for the T20 series against England, the 30-year-old will seek confidence from his heady feats at this venue on that balmy evening in the month of May last year. Since IPL 2016, Raina has been strangely subdued, and off the international radar. He did make an unsuccessful attempt at returning to international circuit. This was in October last year — for the second ODI against New Zealand at Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla. However, a day before that game, BCCI issued a terse press release saying that he was ruled out of the game due to an illness. However, rumours suggested that the real reason for Raina’s axe was because he had flunked the fitness test. Whatever the reason, it was yet another professional setback. Having failed miserably during India’s World T20 campaign earlier last year too did not help Raina’s cause (He scored just 41 runs from five games). Since then, the left-hander was overlooked for the Zimbabwean tour, the two T20Is against West Indies in the United States, and was again left out for the eight ODIs at home against New Zealand and England. With his tapering form and below par fitness levels, many felt that Raina’s best was behind him. They felt that with India having developed and identified a pool of young players, could well stall Raina’s international career. During his time away from the spotlight, Raina became a father, and posted selfies with his wife from exotic foreign locales on Instagram. In the interim, he also met senior Samajwadi Party leader and Rajya Sabha MP Shivpal Yadav ahead of the much-hyped Uttar Pradesh elections. The social media went berserk and photos of his meeting with Shivpal went viral on the internet. Not many know the outcome of that meeting, but a week since, the Uttar Pradesh Ranji captain will be relieved that he has finally got another chance at redemption, and that too in a format he has prospered in the past. “True, he hasn’t played, I will not say for a while because he played the T20 World Cup so we did not have not too many series after that. We played a lot of Test matches so it seems like a bigger gap. We still believe he has enough to contribute in the shorter formats for India. Again, this series will be an opportunity for a lot of guys to get back into the groove or seal their spots or whatever you want to call it. The reason why everyone is included in the squad is because we believe in them, we have faith in them, they can contribute now and in the future as well,” Kohli said when asked about Raina’s inclusion in the T20 squad. Ahead of the Champions Trophy, Raina’s inclusion, along with the return of old guards Yuvraj Singh and Ashish Nehra (he is back after an injury), illustrates the selectors’ rationale in trying to build and invest in a team, which has the ideal blend of youth and experience. The upcoming T20 series might just be the lifeline Raina so desperately wanted to reboot his flagging international career. And there’s no better place to do that then the Green Park Stadium.