Ajinkya Rahane: An alloy of calmness and aggression

A slapping shot over long-on for a boundary and Ajinkya Rahane brought up the first individual score of 100 runs in this season of IPL. The helmet came off, the arms raised in celebration and a soft smile appeared on the young man’s face (yes, no unnecessary anger). But the innings wasn’t just about the incessant leather bashing or the score that he ended up achieving. More than all of that, the innings was about the method and the mannerism in which it was conducted.

103* off just 60 balls on the score-sheet looks like a kind of innings where the batsman must have been on total violation mode from the onset, and that he must have also indulged in some ugly hoicks which he got lucky with. However, the truth is that score-sheets only tell you that much about the quality of an innings and the approach that has gone into it. Never at all in his innings did Rahane look to try anything fancy. Proper text-book cricketing shots all around the ground. So how exactly did Rahane manage to amass these many runs in his innings? The answer to this question can only be pondered upon after looking at his overall record in this IPL season so far. In the very first game for Rajasthan this season, he scored a magnificent 98, missing out on the three figure mark by just two runs. His overall record so far this season has been 319 runs from 7 matches at a staggering average of 53.17 and a strike-rate of 146.33, which is just amazing considering the format of the game. We take a look at his domestic record involving the longer version of the game and what we find is that we are actually looking at a run scoring machine made of flesh, bone and blood.

Now we get back to the unanswered question. How is he able to score these many runs in this honkers-bonkers format of the game where “hit out or get out”  is the supposed modus operandi? And that how is he able to maintain such a high-class consistency in both the longer and shorter version of the game? A calm approach won’t get you these many runs at such a good strike rate in the shorter version and aggression can’t give you the required consistency, be it in any form. The answer lies somewhere in-between the two extremes. In the 2011 movie “X-men: First Class”, when Erik Lensherr (who went on to become Magneto) found it very hard to focus his energy due to an unstable mind, his friend Charles Xavier advised him to focus and find the spot in-between calmness and aggression. He needed to keep calm so as to keep his mind stable and that he needed to combine it with his aggression to channelize his super-strength into the task. He needed to just concentrate and allow his mind to find that spot between calmness and aggression. So the moment Erik started concentrating and eventually found that mid-point, he found it amazingly easy to accomplish his tasks. Rahane’s case is something similar. He seems to have been able to find that mid-point between the two extremes. While his calm approach lends him the longevity in his innings and the consistency, his aggression enables him to play those big shots on a frequent basis. While his calm approach allows him to notch up an average of 68.47 in domestic first-class cricket, it is his aggression that operates in obtaining a strike-rate of 146.33 in this year’s IPL and now an overall strike-rate of 120.18 in T20s, which before the beginning of this season’s IPL was less than 110.

In Chemistry, we come across a term “Alloy”. When two elements are melted into their molten state and then mixed together, they cool down and combine to form a new material. This new material is known as an Alloy. The formed product in many ways is better than the original metals that are melted in terms of strength, reliability and longevity.  More readily available example is that of Steel. Steel is formed when a certain amount of Carbon is mixed with molten Iron, making it more agile, strong, durable and efficient in comparison to Iron.

Looking at Ajinkya Rahane, one can’t stop but think of him as a kind of Alloy himself. An alloy that is made up of both calmness and aggression blended together in just the right proportions. An alloy whose properties are far better than the lonely elements of a calm mind or an aggressive stroke-play. An alloy that has all the right ingredients to function for a much longer duration of time as compared to the individual elements.

Now, it doesn’t matter how strong the steel is, its utility can only be best realized when it is put to the right use in the right place and is taken care of. Likewise, Ajinkya Rahane too needs to be consistently utilized in the right place and taken good care of so that he is rightly able to serve Indian cricket over a long duration of time with all his abundance of talent.