School exams were over and it was time for summer holidays. In 1994, cable TV was in its nascent stages in India, and it seemed like a surreal experience to watch live feed of cricket and other sports from the rest of the world. Around that time, India were touring New Zealand. So, the alarm clock had to be set in order to wake up very early in the morning as the time difference between India and New Zealand is 7 hours and 30 minutes. The anticipation was for India to take a 1-0 lead in the ODI series against a team that was going through a bad patch. A 20-year-old Stephen Fleming, however, had different ideas.
That 20-year-old had already given enough evidence of his potential with a 92 on his Test debut. Just a couple of days later, at the same ground, and against the same opponent, he compiled another neat innings of 90. There were two shots that stood out — a stylish flick and a straight drive. Time stops for none. In 2023, those memorable childhood days are now a distant memory. But those two strokes are still vaguely stored deep in the episodic memories of the brain.
When Rachin Ravindra, another young cricketer with burgeoning potential, essayed a flick and checked drive down the ground, in the 2023 World Cup opener versus England, those memories came flooding back as there was a bit of resemblance in the stroke-play — the trigger was minimal, while the hands, eyes and feet were all corollary to the craft on display.
When Mark Wood bowled a delivery at 92mph, Ravindra pounced on the width on offer and guided it through the minutest of gaps square on the off side. When it was bowled short, out came the debonair pull and the spinners were greeted with lofted shots. It is true that the ball was skidding through a lot more in the second innings, but Ravindra and Devon Conway put on a near-perfect exhibition of stroke-play.
So, who is Rachin Ravindra? In the age of digital media, even the minutest of details don’t escape public glare. There isn’t a lot more to add about his childhood days, growing up years, Rahul Dravid, Sachin Tendulkar and Ross Taylor being his cricketing idols, or how he navigated through spells of India’s Spin Triangle, in Kanpur, in 2021. Although a largely untold innings of 76 against South Africa, in the 2018 Under-19 World Cup, flashes in the mind. More than the flicks, square drives or sweeps, the essence of his batting on that day was he seemed to believe that he belonged to the big stage.
So, it didn’t come as a surprise that he soon had a breakthrough domestic season in New Zealand in 2019-20. By then, he had already started to bat at the top of the order in domestic cricket. Fast-forward to this year, where we witnessed Ravindra scoring a double ton in a county game versus Worcestershire. It just vindicated the point that he can succeed across formats and frontiers.
Just a glance through the highlights package of that game and it could be seen that he was playing very close to the body. Incidentally, Sriram Krishnamurthy, former Northern Districts coach, had mentioned to RevSportz about how Ravindra rigorously practises against the Dukes ball, especially the away-going deliveries, “He practises with Dukes ball during the winters to get the ball swinging away, so he could work on balls swinging away from him.”
Just a few months later, Ravindra was at it again in a World Cup warm-up game against Pakistan, where he accumulated an elegant 97. Following that superlative innings, one was left to wonder whether the World Cup would turn out to be Ravindra’s breakout tournament. He has certainly started the World Cup on a bright note by scoring his maiden international hundred. An innings that compelled you to travel in a time machine to the summer holidays of 1994, where a future New Zealand skipper crunched shots with a similar kind of panache.