Jarrod Kimber, Shayan Ahmad Khan
IPL 2024 is the highest-scoring T20 tournament ever. Teams have crossed 250 eight times. It’s an unprecedented run-fest. However, despite all the madness, no batter has been able to score 87 runs off their first 25 balls in an innings so far this season. Even when it seemed that a batter like Jake Fraser-McGurk or Travis Head was hitting everything out of the park, that number was not eclipsed or matched.
Why 87 off 25? Because Suresh Raina did it, and as far back as IPL 2014. It was against Punjab in a playoff match. That innings was an outlier in the truest sense of the word. When you think of Raina, you picture his trademark inside out shot, played against both pace and spin. Apart from all his batting achievements, he was also a brilliant fielder – one of the greatest produced by India – and a useful part-time offspinner.
Picture Credit – IPLT20.com
When we talk about all-time IPL XIs, most people have Raina in the middle-order in their lineups. In fact, he might have a legitimate case to be called the greatest Indian batter in the IPL. But where does he really rank in the pantheon of IPL greats?
True stats tell us how much better or worse a player performs than the average player would have if he faced the same balls. They also account for venues, so the players who have played in low-scoring matches aren’t penalised.
Among those with at least 4000 runs in the IPL, only three batters have a better true average and true strike rate than Suresh Raina – Chris Gayle, AB de Villiers, and David Warner. If we just look at true strike rates, it is again only those three that are ahead of him. Faf du Plessis is the closest to him.
He batted 85.5% of all his innings at number three. It’s a position best suited for a batter who can maximise the powerplay by scoring quickly against pacers if he comes in early, and who can play spin well thereafter.
A good No. 3 is adept vs pace and spin. And Raina wasn’t just a good No. 3, he was a great one. He was a better player of pace bowling than is sometimes assumed, and he was elite against the turning ball – very handy given his home games were at Chepauk.
When we take a deeper look into Raina’s record against each bowling type, we see that he destroyed left-arm spinners, which is expected from a left-hand batter. However, it’s his record against offspinners that separates him from the rest. His sample size vs left-arm wrist spin is very low and he still has a great true strike-rate against legspin. Against the quicks, he was noticeably better against right-armers than left.
He played a lot from overs 4 to 14, which is a huge chunk of the middle overs. He also had to handle the tricky period at the end of the powerplay after wickets had fallen, and he was still good.
If we break down Raina’s record into phases, he is a plus batter in every phase of the innings. But the most fascinating part of his record is how he performed between overs 7 to 11 – a part of the innings where most batters tend to slow down.
We often see certain batters who are significantly better at either batting first or chasing, often due to technical reasons or practical reasons. As can be seen, Raina had a slightly higher true average in chases than while batting first.
MS Dhoni and Virat Kohli are two legends, and part of that is because they have finished, and won, several games while chasing. Raina was the same player in either innings.
Raina has a better record in the IPL than Dhoni, but one of them was at the end of an awful lot of matches. And this is just the IPL. Dhoni also did this for India at a high level. His legacy is being the man we look at when the game is over. Raina had a different path.
India produce an incredible amount of anchors, usually the sort who start quickly and then knock the ball around for most of their innings. Raina made the runs of an anchor, but his strike rate was way above average for most of his innings. He dipped slightly at the end. That could have been fitness or just the period when he had to face the quicks without the help of the powerplay. He was a beautiful striker of the ball, but not as good at muscling it.
What is remarkable about Raina’s better than par strike rate is that it didn’t stop him being amongst the highest run-scorers. He scored quickly, but also incredibly consistently. From 2008 to 2014, death, taxes and Suresh Raina scoring over 400 runs in the IPL were the constants of life. He brought a sense of comfort and safety for Chennai Super Kings fans. He had a couple more seasons where he scored over 400 runs too, but he was past his absolute prime by then.
His best IPL season was 2013 by a distance. You can see the cluster of seasons where he had a true strike rate of 10 or more in his peak years. He had a negative true average in five seasons, and he had only three seasons where he had a negative true average as well as a negative true strike rate. He was almost always in form, and at worst, he was marginally less optimal than par. Until 2021, which was one year too many.
His career should be looked at in two halves. His numbers from 2008 to 2014 were pretty close to AB de Villiers or David Warner’s overall numbers. So peak Raina was up there with the greatest IPL batters of all time, while he was still a net positive in the second half of his career.
And the guy bowled too. Although his offspin was not as high-usage as someone like Glenn Maxwell’s, he did bowl more than 20 overs each season from 2009 to 2011. He was a pretty useful bowling option – not an allrounder but a backup sixth bowler.
You would expect most offies to be much better against left-handers than right-handers. But there is not much of a difference in Raina’s record. He had a better true economy against righties, but a better number for true wickets per four overs against the left-hand batters. He had a positive true economy against both types, so he was also a net positive part-timer.
Throw in his fielding, and he was the sort of 3D player that India craves today. But although he is an unquestioned great in the IPL, he didn’t have the same level of impact for India. He still was a very good player for his country, but where he is among the pantheon in the IPL at par with a Dhoni or Kohli, he didn’t quite reach the heights they did for India.
He played at Nos.4 and 5 respectively in the 2014 and 2016 T20 World Cups. There is a case to be made that he wasn’t optimally utilised. In hindsight, a top order of Rohit, Kohli, and Raina might have worked better than Shikhar Dhawan or Ajinkya Rahane as openers.
International cricket aside, Raina’s case as the greatest Indian batter in the IPL is really strong. He was a massive part of why CSK won so much. He scored a lot of runs, he scored them quickly, and he did for year after year after year. His approach to T20 batting was ahead of its time, particularly in how he started quickly and continued to look for runs instead of any ‘settling’ period. And he did it at a venue that wasn’t as batting friendly as most others in the IPL.
Every single year CSK could make their pitches turn, pick a bunch of spinners, and know their middle order would be carried by a man who would make a lot of runs, and fast.
Stats from AskCricinfo and Howstat. True stats as of 2nd May by Varun Alvakonda, via Cricsheet
