With his characteristic bashful smile, Ajinkya Rahane announced his farewell from the game that was his life for the last twenty years. In an Instagram video that was as crisp as his punches through covers, he said in a deeply philosophical tone: “The reality of life is that everything has a beginning and everything has an end. When the time comes, we simply have to respect it and move forward.” If there was a hint of regret in his voice, in the uncertainty his career traversed in the last three years, in the greatness it felt agonisingly short of, his smile did well to conceal it, as it had through the thick and thin of his career.
In the two minutes, 22 seconds video, he reflected on his greatest virtue, the gift of timing. It was about guts and grit too, his career of 8413 international runs, 5077 off them in 85 Tests, is defined not so much by the sheer numbers as by the immensity of his knocks, the moments some of his knocks have etched. The statistics took a hit in the final stretch of his career, as it did to his contemporaries Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara, dropping from mid-40s to a pedestrian 38.48, but Rahane leaves with the warmth of scripting some of his country’s most famous moments in the Virat Kohli era.
He neither craved limelight not did limelight go in pursuit of him, but he was there in Lord’s with a hundred in India’s first victory at the most sacred ground in the world; he was there at MCG twice, with a luminescent 147 and a 112 that ignited the most dramatic turnaround in the history of Indian cricket. Imperishably, Rahane would be remembered for this century and the series, the man who started the fightback after 36 all out capitulation in Adelaide, and shepherded a group of rookies to an improbably dramatic series triumph. How good a captain he would have been is a conjecture, but he had a serene authority about him that inspired the men around him, a tactical sharpness lost in his mild manners.