Cometh the hour, cometh the man: The KL Rahul comeback story
2021 started rather sedately for KL Rahul. He wasn’t part of the Indian Test team that was creating history in Australia and wasn’t even the 3rd choice opener with Rohit Sharma and Shubman Gill playing really well and Mayank Agarwal the back up.
Rahul was back home and tweeting about the team’s success in Brisbane. However, hard work and the zeal to not give up has made sure he has ended 2021 in the best mind space possible. An excellent white-ball season followed by an equally good red-ball series against England and now South Africa, Rahul is now a certainty in the Indian team across formats and has also elevated himself into a leadership position, which was unthinkable just 12 months earlier.
It was when Shubman got injured ahead of the England series that Rahul again started to knock on the doors of the national team. And with a stellar show in England, he made sure that the selectors and the team management turned to him when Rohit got injured and was ruled out of the South Africa series.
"It is time now for him to make it all count" - Sourav Ganguly on KL Rahul
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As Sourav Ganguly put it in context on my show BackstageWithBoria, “This is a major opportunity for KL Rahul. We know he is talented. It is time now for him to make it all count.” Rahul, to his credit, did that to perfection. Man of the moment with the fantastic hundred on Day 1 of the first Test match, Rahul has made a telling statement.
So is KL Rahul the answer to India starting well in 2022 and is he the match winner across all formats now having put all debate to rest? Few, it must be said, will want to punt against Rahul. To go back to him and to something he had said to me in 2019 when he was going through the worst crisis in his life, “I will work the hardest I can and that’s all that I need to do. The rest will take care of itself”, he said. He, at the end of 2021, stands vindicated. With Rahul starting to make the most of his potential, the only beneficiary can be Indian cricket.