Suresh Raina is a retired Indian international cricketer born on 27th November 1986. He also served as a stand-in captain for the Indian national cricket squad now and then. Raina is an aggressive left-handed batsman and also bowls as an off-spinner occasionally. He holds a record of scoring a century in all three international cricket formats, and he's the first Indian cricketer to do so.

In addition, Raina has been one of the youngest players ever to serve as the Indian international cricket team captain. He started his cricket career by playing in the domestic cricket circuit for the Uttar Pradesh cricket team.

He's been very active in the Indian Premier League. Moreover, Suresh Raina also served as the captain for the Gujarat Lions team and vice-captain for the Chennai Super Kings before he retired from IPL. He announced his retirement from International Cricket on 15th August 2020.

Life Before Cricket

Suresh Raina was born in a Kashmiri pandit family in Muradnagar, Uttar Pradesh. His parents are from Rainawari, Srinagar district of Jammu and Kashmir. Suresh Raina lives in the neighborhood of Rajnagar in Ghaziabad city. All his schooling is done in a boarding school.

Personal Life

• Suresh Raina's father Trilokchand Raina was a military officer in an ordinance factory. His family left 'Rainawari' in Jammu and Kashmir union territory of India amid the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus in the 1990s and settled down in Muradnagar town, Ghaziabad district, Uttar Pradesh. Raina trained in the Guru Gobind Singh sports college, Lucknow in 1998. Raina has a sister and his one elder brother is in Indian Army.
• Raina married Priyanka on 3 April 2015. They have two children.
• Raina's uncle Ashok Kumar was assaulted during a robbery in their house in Punjab, and didn't survive. Due to this, Raina withdrew from 2020 IPL season to be with his family.
• Raina received an honorary doctorate from Vels University on 5 August 2022.
• 12 July 2023 is the Grand Opening of his Indian restaurant in Amsterdam, where he will be serving authentic Indian cuisine.

Style of Play

Suresh Raina is a middle-order left-handed batsman with an aggressive attitude towards his batting style. Due to his aggressive batting style, he has seen success in all formats of cricket other than test cricket. Suresh Raina occasionally bowls as an off-break bowler.

Throughout his career, the teams he played against always tried to take advantage of his weakness of short balls. He faced a lot of criticism for his weakness of short-pitched balls. He also struggled greatly because of this drawback, even in the Ranji Trophy domestic cricket. He scored most of the runs in his career in the mid-wicket on-side area, and most of the time, he's seen playing inside-out off-drive shots. He is fantastic at hitting the ball offside as he creates room for himself.

Journey Till World Cup

Suresh Raina has not been an active player and has been on the bench for the first few months of 2011. Initially, Raina was not in the right form to secure a place in the team, so instead, the captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni opted for Yousuf Patan in place of Suresh Raina. Later Virender Sehwag was badly injured, so he got replaced with Raina, who consistently performed against West Indies.

Seeing Raina's performance Dhoni, the team captain, devised a new strategy and opted for Suresh Raina in place of Yusuf Patan in the quarter-final against the defending champion team Australia. So, Raina played a vital role; he scored thirty-four runs off twenty-eight balls and gave Yuvraj Singh an enduring partnership. This eventually led India to win the quarter-finals of the world cup. Furthermore, his performance was phenomenal in the semi-final match against Pakistan. He coordinated with the tailenders to reach the final score of two hundred and sixty runs with a contribution of thirty-six runs.

In the semi-final match, he played a crucial role by taking Younis Khan's catch off of Yuvraj Singh's bowling. This helped the team India win the ICC World Cup 2011. 'Raina won the world cup for us with some crucial knocks' is the statement passed by the coach Gary Kirsten about Raina.

Domestic Career

Raina started his cricket career in 2000. He wanted to play cricket, so he shifted from his hometown Ghaziabad to Lucknow. Suresh Raina successfully cleared his under-sixteen matches and became the captain of the Uttar Pradesh team. He scored two half-centuries in his under nineteen matches. He also went to Srilanka the following year with the under seventeen teams.

He made it to Ranji Trophy against Assam when he was sixteen in February 2003. However, due to some reasons, he did not play any other matches till next season. He was listed in India's List A, opposite Madhya Pradesh, in 2005. He happened to score sixteen runs in that match. He played for many domestic teams, namely India Blue, India Green, India Red, India under nineteen, and India under sixteen. In the 2006 Ranji Trophy, he scored six hundred and twenty runs in just 6 games. Later in 2018, he stepped down from Uttar Pradesh's team captaincy because of his poor performance in Ranji Trophy.

His performance was so poor, and he just scored 105 runs in 9 innings with an average of 11.66. Akshdeep Nath replaced him as a captain.

Earlier in 2003, Raina also went on a tour to Pakistan to play the Under-19 Asian ODI Championship. In 2004, he was selected for the Under-19 World Cup, showing his unmatched performance by scoring three half-centuries. He scored 90 runs just out of 38 balls, which was then noticed by the BCCI, awarding him a Border-Gavaskar scholarship for his training overseas at the Australian Cricket Academy.

He made his debut in first-class limited-overs cricket in 2005 and had a spectacular average of 53.75 runs with a total score of 645 runs in the entire season.

Indian Premier League

Suresh Raina was among the best performers in the Chennai Super Kings team in IPL 2010. He even won the 'Best Fielder' award by the BCCI before the finals of the IPL 2010 season. He played an important role in the season's final game against the Mumbai Indians.

Suresh Raina made it to the list of the players who played 200 matches in the Indian Premier League in 2021. He is the fourth player to enter this list in IPL history after MS Dhoni, Dinesh Karthik, and Rohit Sharma. He acted as the commentator for the IPL 2022 as he was left unsold in the 2022 Indian Premier League Auctions.

International Career

Suresh Raina is also commended as the best fielder in the Indian team. He is a middle-order player.

In the 2011 Cricket World Cup, he scored thirty-six runs and made India win at two hundred and sixty runs.

Suresh Raina, in the India tour of England, scored a single half-century (50 runs), and besides that, he showed a very bad performance by scoring just 27 runs from playing seven innings. As all his opponents know, his weakness for short-pitched balls, they took good advantage of it, making him struggle for the entire series. In the final test of the tournament, he managed to play 29 balls without scoring a single run leaving him to break the record of playing the longest time without scoring a single run. He was ducked out playing for about 29 balls in that final test, the longest in India's Test history.

Achievements

• Suresh Raina holds the badge of honor as the first Indian player to score 6000 runs and 8000 runs in his T20s career.
• Suresh Raina is the first-ever cricketer to reach a milestone of 5000 runs in the Indian Premier League.
• He holds a record as the first Indian cricket player to hit 100 sixes in the IPL and is the second player to do so after Chris Gayle.
• Raina was the highest run-scorer in the Champion's League T20, averaging 842 runs.
• Raina also scored the highest number of half-centuries in the Champion's League T20 history.
• He holds the record for scoring the highest number of runs during a powerplay in an IPL match.
• Raina holds another record in the Indian Premier League for the most number of catches caught, which is 107 catches.