KL Rahul has Test centuries in Australia, England, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. He averages 47.67 in ODIs and has a strike-rate (87.37), comparable to that of Steve Smith and Joe Root. In T20Is, he has a better strike-rate and twice as many centuries (2) as Virat Kohli. Why, then, is he the butt of so many jokes and the target of such venom from so-called fans?
If you followed the social-media narrative, you’d think Rahul was a plodder with the numbers of the erstwhile Maharajah of Vizianagram, whose six innings for India in 1936 fetched him 33 runs. One of the kinder words used about him is sifarshi, someone in the team on the recommendation of someone high and mighty.
But why would a Virat Kohli or Rohit Sharma promote Rahul? It’s true that Kohli and he were IPL teammates at Royal Challengers Bangalore, but that was more than half a decade ago. For Rohit, he is a potential threat, someone who could slot into his opening role across formats. What about the administrators then? The man who makes the big calls for the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) these days is Jay Shah, the secretary from Gujarat. Why would he intervene on behalf of someone from Karnataka? The previous board president was Sourav Ganguly, from Bengal. Again, no obvious connection.
Given how closely cricket and filmdom are intertwined in India, is it possible that Rahul’s marriage to the daughter of a Bollywood star could give him a leg up? That’s an even more absurd suggestion than the sifarshi angle. Suniel Shetty had a few hits in the 1990s and early 2000s, but no one would ever mention him in the same breath as the three Khans or even Akshay Kumar. He hasn’t been an A-lister for well over a decade.
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What eats these fans then? Is it his personality? A generation ago, Ravi Shastri was constantly heckled at Indian grounds. But Shastri had an abrasive personality and was a flamboyant character who never bothered to walk the straight and narrow. In conservative 1980s India, that was a red rag to a bull.
Rahul, however, is always polite and soft-spoken. He never gets into scraps on the field, and doesn’t mouth off away from it. There was a minor controversy a few years ago, over some indiscreet remarks on a chat show, but if that’s the worst you can say about a young man, then we really are scraping the barrel.
On the field, like every other player before him, Rahul has endured some tough times. When India perform especially badly, as they did at the T20 World Cup in Dubai in 2021, the bloodlust for scapegoats would make vampires blush. Rahul, who struggled for form and fluency then, was one of the obvious choices. But in recent times, it’s collective batting failures that have cost India on the big stage. When India lost the World Test Championship (WTC) final to Australia in June, the injured Rahul wasn’t even in the squad.
The conclusion then, as is so often the case with social-media trends, is that the relentless criticism of Rahul is just utter nonsense. There is nothing provocative about his behaviour, and his playing record certainly doesn’t merit this kind of angst. At the Premadasa on Monday, he batted quite beautifully, setting the tone for what would become a mammoth unbeaten 233-run partnership with Kohli.
While Kohli played himself in, it was Rahul who ensured the scoring rate didn’t dip below six. He was the one who didn’t allow the Pakistani spinners to settle, and it was only in the final stages of the innings that Kohli streaked past him. Even then, Rahul made sure that he finished with a strike-rate well over 100.
With Shreyas Iyer very much in the mix, India now have multiple options for that No. 4 spot. Given the match situation, even Hardik Pandya could be used there. What is for sure, however, is that the team management views Rahul very differently from his critics on X, Facebook and Instagram. It probably helps that they know a little bit about both cricket and numbers.
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