Ajinkya Rahane's success as opener adds to India's selection conundrum

By Chetan Narula from Nottingham

Usually MS Dhoni tends to be quite unpredictable on the cricket field. He likes to keep the opposition guessing and the fans baffled. But he did something uncharacteristic after the 133-run win in Cardiff. He declared emphatically that ‘Ajinkya Rahane will bat at number four and Suresh Raina at number five’ as team India begins their preparations for the 2015 World Cup.

“This will be the batting order in a normal situation, 98 out of 100 times going forward. Of course there can be changes since you cannot play in ODIs with fixed plans. Maybe with 2-3 overs remaining I will come in at number five or sometimes if we have a long partnership at the top, then you don’t want to send in your batsmen number three or four, and instead send in number five-six,” the Indian skipper had said.

His declaration meant that, more or less, India will have a fixed batting order in the build-up to Australia-New Zealand. Fate had other plans though as Rohit Sharma got injured and was ruled out of the series. As a result, in the very next match after Dhoni’s statement, Rahane opened the innings as Ambati Rayudu came into the team and batted at number four.

At the same time, Murali Vijay has been named as replacement for Rohit and has joined the team. Will he play at all in this series and open the innings with Rahane returning to number four? Will Rayudu be dropped after one outing? The answer to this selection dilemma can be found only if it can be ascertained that Vijay is India’s third-choice opener for the World Cup.

He isn’t a ballistic batsman, with a strike-rate of 66.40, and doesn’t even enjoy that reputation in T20 cricket despite a career-strike rate of 122.10. Over the past couple seasons he has proven himself to be more of an accumulator of runs. It works well when you open the innings with someone like Shikhar Dhawan, who will tend to go after the bowling from the beginning itself. It can be said that Vijay and Rohit are in much the same mould.

This accumulation becomes a problem in overseas conditions when Dhawan doesn’t fire and doesn’t get you quick starts. In South Africa and New Zealand, the left-handed opener scored 12, 0, 32, 12, 28 and 9. India’s opening partnerships were 14, 10, 15, 22, 64 and 8 as Rohit too didn’t find much success with scores of 18, 19, 3, 20, 39, 79 and 4. That 79-run innings came in the fourth ODI at Hamilton where Dhawan had been dropped.

Not everyone is convinced about Rohit’s credentials as an opener in overseas conditions because he tends to take his time to get going. Since that double hundred against Australia last November, he has only four fifties to his name in 16 matches and two of those came in the sub-continent. But Dhoni is impressed with his role so far and before the series began he went as far as to profess that ‘Rohit is a good opener’.

It brings Dhawan’s performance under the scanner. At the moment he is a shadow of the batsman who sizzled in the 2013 Champions Trophy. Since that tournament, he has played 31 matches and produced three hundreds as well as five fifties. It implies that he crosses the 50-run mark every four matches, but look at the finer print. Two of those hundreds have come in India and one in Zimbabwe. Only one of those fifties came outside the sub-continent, that too in West Indies where conditions nowadays are quite different from those in England, South Africa or Down Under.

It can be asserted then that Dhawan needs to score in the two ODIs at Birmingham and Leeds. Otherwise the selectors will have a major headache when they sit to select the ODI team to take on West Indies at home. He must be eagerly waiting for that series because if he scores at home he is almost guaranteed a spot in the World Cup squad.

Where does this leave Rahane then? “Apart from being a middle-order batsman Rahane is also someone who will have to open if the team needs him to do that. He opens in T20 cricket and IPL. So he has fair amount of experience when it comes to opening the innings,” Dhoni had said after the six-wicket win in Nottingham.

Every time Dhawan or Rohit have gone missing, Rahane has been given the makeshift opener’s role. When he has batted at the top of the order (1-3) in 23 matches, he averages 27.17, scoring five of his six fifties. In the absence of Yuvraj Singh, he has been assigned the number four batsman. In 9 matches there, he averages a horrendous 23.88. This continuous to-and-fro has obviously taken a toll on his consistency.

India’s two wins on the bounce against a frail England ODI line-up has masked their obvious negative points. They have four openers to choose from and one of them also doubles up as a middle-order batsman. Six months away from the World Cup, such indecisiveness can prove costly.

The tri-series in the ODI leg of Australian tour in January will be a dress-rehearsal for the World Cup later on. India must decide until then as to what their optimum opening combination is and where must Rahane bat to be able to contribute his best to the team. They need to consider if they indeed need Vijay as third-opener or are satisfied with Rahane’s double-act, and if so, thus beefing up the middle order giving Rayudu or even Sanju Samson more chances.

Dhoni, and the Indian selectors, have seven matches – two against England and five against West Indies – to do this.