If you are a cricket fan, you must know how popular Suresh Raina is in cricket. He is a former Indian cricketer who has represented India in all formats of cricket test, ODIs, and T-20s matches. Suresh Raina, the left-arm batsman, is known for his batting in limited over cricket like T20s and ODIs. He has helped India and his club by winning many matches and tournaments. He took retirement in 2020 from international cricket but continued to play IPL. Thus, if you want to know more about his career and how he became one of the greatest batsmen of IPL and T20 cricket, then keep reading.
Suresh Raina, an aggressive middle-order batsman, was born on 27 November 1986 in Uttar Pradesh to a Kashmiri Pandit family. After seeing his talent in cricket, his parent decided to send him to Guru Gobind Singh Sports College. He started his cricket training professionally and became more serious about cricket. He has represented Uttar Pradesh in his youth cricket career and even captained the Uttar Pradesh team in the U-16 cricket tournament.
Not only that, at the very young age of 15 years, he got called up for a U-19 Indian team tour to England. He performed well in the tournament and made a couple of half-centuries to impress the selectors. He then played for the Indian youth team and was, for example, he has played for teams like India Blue, India Red, India u-19, etc., at such a very young age. Thus he was a very talented and promising young cricketer in the country of his time.
Apart from batting, Raina can bowl too as he is a right-arm spin bowler and was one of the greatest fielders on the team. Thus he was considered a good all-rounder for the Indian team. He debuted for the Indian national team in 2005 in the ODIs series against Sri Lanka. His T-20 debut came a year later, in 2006, against South Africa. He was among the very few batsmen who was performing consistently in the limited over cricket and hence was giving a strong finish to the Indian team whenever needed. He also won the world cup in 2011 and performed well in the tournament.
He scored 36 runs in the semi-finals, which was a very crucial contribution by him to make his team qualify for the finals. Suresh Raina was more successful in ODIs and T-20s than a test. He is the first Indian batsman to score 8000 runs in T-20. He was also a good bowler; thus, he was used by the Indian captain on several occasions whenever a change was needed in bowling. He was also an extremely talented fielder who surely lifted the level of fielding in the Indian cricket team. He has contributed a lot with his fielding and has been one of the highest catch takers of the Indian cricket team.
He started his IPL career with Chennai Super Kings and was picked up by them for 2.6 crores. Suresh Raina showed his potential to the world by scoring runs for his team in the absence of great players like Michael Hussey, Mathew Hayden, etc. Soon he became one of the key players of the CSK. If you talk about his IPL stats, he has scored over 5000 runs in a total of 193 matches and has picked up over 20 wickets in his career. He is the first batsman to score over 5000 runs in the IPL. He has helped CSK a lot in winning IPL trophies both with bat and bowl.
After CSK was banned for two years, he became the captain of the new IPL franchise Gujarat Lions. He played for GL for a couple of years but then returned to his original team CSK where the team retained him following the IPL 2018. But unfortunately, he got injured and could not play most of the matches of the IPL. Then in 2020, due to some personal reason, he did not play in the IPL and withdrew his name from the tournament. Thus he has been inconsistent in performing at the top level for a couple of years now, which has affected his career in the following IPL 2022. He remained unsold and was not purchased by any of the IPL teams.
It is very unfortunate for him as he is considered Mr. IPL because of his records in his IPL career. He has also achieved the milestone of playing over 200 matches in the IPL. Thus all the fans are disheartened and sad because this will be the first season where they will not be able to watch their favorite cricketer.