On the Edge of Beauty

Have you ever experienced awe and anger simultaneously?

If you ask ChatGPT to describe KL Rahul in a couple of lines, it will start lagging. Then the blinking cursor will move - writing and erasing in loops - and eventually serve up a reduction of his career statistics as its best attempt. Listen closely, and you might hear Rahul’s soft voice through the text-to-speech prompt: “Don't bother, man.”

During India’s first Test match of the ongoing series against New Zealand, Rahul found himself at number six, a purgatory below Rishabh Pant and Sarfaraz Khan. He barely troubled the scorers. Number six has been his designated spot for the last twelve-ish months.¹

Batting orders are weird things, a delicate assembly of specialised skills more than a hierarchy of talent. Each position demands a specific kind of craft, and batters usually come with a very specific toolbox. Yes, they can adapt - these are international athletes after all - but push them too far from their natural habitat and watch their balance and equilibrium go. For example, if Virat Kohli opens the batting against the new red cherry, the results will not be pleasing to the eyes, ears, or television ratings.

KL Rahul made his international debut in 2014, at Melbourne. In that Test, he batted at number six in the first innings and number three in the second innings. Just a week later, in the next Test match, he was sent to open against Mitchell Starc, Ryan Harris, and Josh Hazlewood. He scored a century.

Three innings, three vastly different challenges. Rahul had basically played striker, midfielder, and defender in his first week with the navy blue India cap.

That first century earned him a spot. India had been struggling to find a reliable opening partner for Murali Vijay. Two more centuries in three Tests later, Rahul seemed like a ready-made solution gifted by the cricket gods in Bangalore. 

Those early innings hinted at something special. His batting was pure, fluid, unhurried - at beautiful contrast with his age and experience. The mechanics and music of his shots hit all the right spots.

Then the runs began coming, and we were hooked. After the strong debut series in Australia, he shone in Sri Lanka and West Indies. And, during the 2016-17 home season, he truly hit escape velocity. There was a 199 against England, followed by a stretch of six half-centuries in seven innings against Australia.

His brisk scoring-rate in Tests suggested an easy transition to white-ball cricket. The Indian Premier League had been a cool playground so far, but he needed a more central role than he had been getting. He moved from a bit-part role at the Royal Challengers Bengaluru - walking behind Gayle, Virat, and AB de Villiers - to become the butcher-in-chief at the Kings XI Punjab. In his first season with the new team, in 2018, he completely lit up the IPL. Opening for KXIP, he scored more than 650 runs at a breakneck speed, dishing up an intoxicating cocktail of grace and power-hitting.

It was as if a piece of art had finally, fully unfurled. You recognised the shapes and contours from the pencil sketch, but the final product was almost from a different world.

At his best, watching Rahul bat was like finding a way to stretch time. His trigger movement - if you could call it that - was so minimal it was almost theoretical. His bat, precise as an architect's pencil, traced straight lines through the air. The ball disappeared in neat angles. In attack and defence, the aesthetics were spellbinding.

This was batting that belonged to galleries and museums - anywhere that could hold a mosaic of moving portraits capturing the full spectrum of twenty-first century batting. Rahul would serve you a classical straight drive, then pivot to a modernist paddle sweep, and finish with an avant-garde heave into the stadium's upper tiers - all executed with the kind of baroque grace that made violence look beautiful.

And every shot was followed by that smile - shy, almost apologetic, as if embarrassed by his own excellence.

Midway through 2018, KL Rahul was primed to join Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli as the ones to take Indian batting beyond the stratosphere.

Then he lost his rhythm in Test cricket. And it wasn’t just a minor hiccup. He was finding new ways to get out. One day, his stumps would be splattered before he could finish his batswing; the next, he would try to heave an opening bowler into a different postcode and find that he had misread the line of the ball.

His form got so dire that he was dropped midway through a series in Australia. There was a spell of six single-digit scores in eight innings, while a group of young openers were banging the doors down at the selectors’ office.

The Test team spot, once indefinitely leased to him, began to feel like a distant memory with every passing series. He retreated to domestic cricket's workshop, accumulated runs like a student coming back to college for extra credits, but still found the international gates hard to breach. India were intent on giving Mayank Agarwal, Rohit Sharma, and Prithvi Shaw a long run at the top of the batting order. The middle order was packed too. Rahul had to wait for his turn.

That turn came two long years later. Prithvi's form had fallen off a cliff and Mayank suffered an injury before a full Test tour to England in the summer of 2021. Rahul found himself facing an Asian batter’s sternest test - opening against James Anderson and Stuart Broad under wet, grey English skies.

Rahul began that series with an 84 at Nottingham, and followed it up with a century and a Man of The Match award in a famous victory at Lord’s. He was so good that he was made vice-captain of the Test team after the tour. Few months later, India went to South Africa. He opened and scored another century, laying the foundation for another away Test win for India.

As Karthik Krishnaswamy's research revealed here: since 1992, only six Asian openers had scored a century in South Africa, fourteen had done it in England, and just ten in Australia. Among them all, just two names appeared in all three honours boards - the criminally underappreciated Saeed Anwar, and our man, KL Rahul.²

This was a potential Hollywood hero walking around in garage-sale shoes. Somewhere in the middle of that spell was a T20 World Cup where the entire Indian team looked like writing-room interns at an Oscars after-party. In the Coke Studio Derby, Shaheen Shah Afridi dismissed Rahul with such theatrical flourish that the moment is still alive on Instagram reels.

But form was only one part of his anxieties. His body was an even more unreliable ally. For all his fitness - and he carried himself with the lean grace of a sprinter - his muscles seemed to harbour some ancient grudge. Every time he felt the tailwind of rhythm and stability, some rogue ligament would flare up in protest, forcing another stint at the rehab centre.

Lifetime membership at the clinic. Credit: Wisden.

Midway through 2022, a sports hernia ruled him out for months, which ate away into the Test season. He came back, was made stand-in captain, couldn’t cross the score of 23 in ten consecutive Test innings, and was dropped again.

Yet, while his Test career rode sharp highs and brutal troughs, his ODI game found steadier ground. But even there, he had to adapt. The preferred batting spots were out of reach, because the trinity of Shikhar Dhawan, Rohit Sharma, and Virat Kohli had marked their territory with permanent ink. So Rahul, too gifted to be discarded, found himself shoehorned as a middle-order man Friday - part crisis manager, part finishing artist, never quite the protagonist he was meant to be.

That role unlocked a new dimension to his batting. Between the 2019 and 2023 ODI World Cups, Rahul scored 2851 runs at an average of 49.5. Those are staggering numbers.

This new style of measured aggression had become his ticket into the ODI and Test setups. But it also extracted its toll from his T20 game. IPL runs still flowed, yes, but without the match-winning velocity of old. At times, it seemed as if freedom had become his enemy.

When the 2023 ODI World Cup squad was announced, the murmurs began quickly. They acknowledged his numbers, of course, but questioned everything else. What if his careful reconstruction crumbled under pressure? His public persona - quiet, unassuming, almost reticent in front of the camera and mic - was painted as a symptom of fragility. 

Rahul Dravid and Rohit Sharma paid little heed to that kind of noise. Rahul was key. They needed his technique, his composure, his ability to read cricket's rhythm sheet in the middle overs. They couldn't have known how quickly, though.

Chennai, India’s World Cup opener against Australia. Batting second, India found themselves reeling at 2-3, the Australian quicks having dented all their hopes of a relaxed stroll towards an innocuous-looking target.

What followed was a masterclass in any batting, nevermind the format. Rahul, along with Virat Kohli, first blunted Hazlewood and Starc, then stabilised the innings as the change-bowlers came in, and later took the Australian spinners apart with surgical precision. Rahul's 98 not out should be remembered as one of India’s great World Cup knocks. It is, instead, already forgotten.

Between that game and the semi-final, KL scored nearly 400 runs at a strike rate of over 100. By any stretch, that’s an incredible tournament.

And then came the final at Ahmedabad. A hot, dry afternoon soothed by the noise from a hundred thousand blue droplets. An air show where fighter jets painted the Indian tricolour on the bright, blue sky. Ministers, film actors, ex-cricketers - all in attendance. Record breaking numbers on streaming applications.

This was the final game of a tournament where the India team had sparked conversations about being the greatest ODI unit ever. Just a couple of days earlier, they had scored 398 runs in the bloody semi-final. This was going to be the coronation of Indian cricket. Against mighty Australia, of all teams.

Rohit Sharma took flight, as he had done so often through the tournament. A bit later, Virat Kohli smoked Mitchell Starc for three consecutive fours. Rumour has it that instant delivery apps like Blinkit and Zepto received thousands of orders for a box of fireworks around 2:30pm IST on November 19, 2023.

Then the engine started sputtering.

76-1 after 9.3 overs became 81-3 within five minutes. KL Rahul and Virat Kohli at the crease, once again. They had to fortify on the foundation, take India to a near-par total, and leave the evening to the real stars of the tournament - the bowlers. 

Instead, Rahul froze, probably from the magnitude of the occasion. The Australian bowlers, sensing vulnerability, coiled around him like pythons. He could neither hit boundaries nor manoeuvre them for singles. His 66 runs felt like watching paint dry in slow motion, but with a six-foot, burly Aussie giggling behind the shoulder. With evening dew guaranteed to assist batting conditions in the second half of the game, the final was as good as sealed when KL was snapped up by Mitchell Starc.

Between that 98 in Chennai and the 66 in Ahmedabad lies the essence of KL Rahul's cricket - sublime artistry forever flirting with imminent collapse.

In the months after that final, a dazed and broken India went to South Africa to play a two-match Test series. In the first Test, Rahul produced one of those innings that makes watchers forget about the other ten players in the team. The scorecard read something on those lines too.

His next few innings after that century read: 4, 8, 86, 22, 16, 68, 0, 12.

Rahul continues to stay within the Test team’s orbit. The volume of runs isn’t great, but even so, in his last ten Test innings, he averages more (33) than Virat Kohli (26) and Rohit Sharma (25).³

This Wednesday, on the evening before India’s second Test match against New Zealand, coach Gautam Gambhir was asked about Rahul's form and whether he merited a place in the lineup. Gambhir spoke in an assured tone, but his final words on the topic were curious: “I am sure he would be knowing that he wants to score big runs, he has that capability of scoring these big runs that is why he is being backed by the team management.”

If you're like me and carry the problematic itch of reading between the lines, that sounds a lot like backing an off-balance player instead of blind faith in an elite batter.

The next morning, Rahul was dropped.

In came Shubman Gill - crown prince of Indian cricket, blessed with stardust and style. Gill has been in good form. Rahul's spot in the batting lineup, at number six, is now taken by Sarfaraz Khan, whose record is so good it borders on silly. Sarfaraz’s domestic cricket stats read like fiction, and he has carried that momentum to his international career. Just last week, his 150 hauled India from an abyss in the Bangalore Test.

Rahul can hardly complain. It speaks to his incredible versatility and skill that different captains and coaches have seen him as capable of filling all sorts of gaps. Yet, he hasn’t erected the monuments of runs that will force their hands. The dynamism of old, when good rhythm was just a couple of well-timed sixes away, seems to have caught the last flight out.

India have one more home Test before embarking on a nine-month spell where they will play five Tests each in Australia and England. Given Sarfaraz’s form and Shubman’s obvious potential, Rahul is unlikely to play that game in Mumbai. 

He has got his boarding pass for Australia, though. He was always going to. Logic suggests Rahul will start the first game there, where his technique against high pace might prove valuable in ways Sarfaraz's exploits cannot yet promise. But that's also where it gets tricky. Australia are beginning the series at Perth, going to a day-night Test in Adelaide, and swiftly moving to Brisbane. These venues are guaranteed to produce challenging tracks, and run-scoring will take a mountaineer's effort against an attack as good as Cummins-Starc-Hazlewood. There is a high likelihood that, at a few points, the Indian batting card might look similar to the one against South Africa from the picture above.

Unless KL Rahul can conjure up another innings from the high heavens, it might be a big, long pack up to the back seats of the bench. Indian cricket dishes out top-quality batters on a conveyor belt, and the whispers will grow louder for Rohit and Gambhir to blood new talent. Someone who can make a career out of opportunity, or someone who has built a strong edifice in domestic cricket.

It’s a bit sad. This should have been Rahul's time to lead Indian batting's next generation, to be the bridge between eras. Have the team management always dealt him a fair hand? Maybe not. But great teams often leave very good players grasping to find a spot. Ask Yuvraj Singh, who tried all possible routes but couldn’t break through to the Test team.

Rahul’s career is simultaneously a credit to his immense talent and a disappointment for the heights it hasn’t touched. It is not time for an obituary yet, not by a long stretch, but at his age(32), summer is long gone, and the autumn leaves are falling. That typical KL Rahul soaring century, when nobody else can stand for five minutes, will have to come soon, before winter sets in.

1. Barring a brief period earlier this year, that is. During England’s trip to India in January ‘24, Rahul was asked to fill in for Virat Kohli at number four. He scored 86.

2. Rahul has two centuries in South Africa from different batting positions, two centuries and multiple fifties in England, and a debut-series century in Australia. Have you ever felt awe and anger simultaneously?

3. I don't know whether that says good things about Rahul or bad things about the other two, or maybe bad things about all three. For reasons of safety, we will assume that watermelon is a good fruit.