MS Dhoni's Legacy and Suresh Raina's Journey in Indian Cricket

MS Dhoni’s shadow still stretches across Indian cricket, long after he walked away. Nine years since he gave up the captaincy. Six since he retired from international cricket. The honours board from his era still reads like a fantasy checklist: T20 World Cup, Champions Trophy, No. 1 Test ranking for the first time, a 50-over World Cup after 28 aching years. India have chased that last one ever since 2011 and are still empty-handed.

Those years were not just about trophies. They were about a ruthless transition. Big names were nudged out, sometimes pushed, as Dhoni backed a new core. Virat Kohli grew from hot-headed prodigy to batting pillar. Rohit Sharma’s career flipped on its head when he moved to the top of the order. Yuvraj Singh, between 2007 and 2011, played with a cold, devastating clarity. Suresh Raina turned No. 7 into a match-winning slot. Shikhar Dhawan walked into Test cricket with the highest score by an Indian opener on debut.

Then the baton passed. Dhoni stepped aside, Kohli took over, and the tone of Indian cricket changed again.

Kohli’s hard reset

Under Kohli, “good enough” was no longer good enough. The fitness bar went up. The Yo-Yo test became non-negotiable. There was no hiding place for reputations. If you couldn’t keep up, you slipped out of the frame, no matter what your past read.

The churn was brutal. Between early 2017 and the 2019 World Cup in England, the dressing room changed shape. Several familiar faces disappeared from the white-ball set-up. Raina was one of them.

By the time India landed in England for that World Cup, the side felt redesigned. KL Rahul had grown into a dependable middle-order presence. Ravindra Jadeja and Hardik Pandya had locked down the all-rounders’ roles. The No. 4 spot remained a puzzle, with Ambati Rayudu and then Vijay Shankar tried as solutions. Raina, once central to India’s limited-overs plans, was nowhere in the picture.

He read the signs. On August 15, 2020, hours after Dhoni stunned everyone with his retirement announcement, Raina quietly followed him into the sunset at just 33. In a recent conversation with Aakash Chopra, he peeled back the story of how that end arrived — through silence more than ceremony.

“Every captain has his own team”

“See, every captain has his own team. He obviously feels someone else is better,” Raina said, reflecting on the shift. He recalled failing the Yo-Yo test along with Yuvraj Singh, then clearing it. He spoke of going back to domestic cricket, grinding, scoring runs. He mentioned a conversation with Anil Kumble, then coach, who told him there were specific areas to work on.

Raina pointed to his performances in South Africa, where he felt he had made a strong case in T20Is. In his telling, he was the Player of the Tournament there. The record says otherwise: Bhuvneshwar Kumar took that honour with seven wickets across the series. Raina did have a standout night in the third T20I, though, winning Player of the Match for a sharp 43 off 27 balls and 1 for 27 with the ball.

But when the 2019 World Cup squad was named, Raina watched others board the plane to England. “In the 2019 World Cup, a different batter was preferred for England. A different keeper went there too. Back then, I felt that I could have done better,” he said.

The frustration wasn’t just about selection. It was about the silence around it.

“Players expect respect. The communication could have been better, such as what are the selectors thinking? What message is being given to them by them? But that’s not in our control. I asked plenty of questions, but didn’t get any answers. I spoke to both the captain and the coaches. But they did what they felt was right.”

The door hadn’t been slammed in his face. It had simply never opened again.

The numbers that stopped talking for him

At his peak, up to the 2015 World Cup, Raina was indispensable in India’s limited-overs blueprint. A left-hander who could finish games, bowl handy off-spin, and change matches in the field. After that, the decline was sharp.

His well-known weakness against good short-pitched bowling, especially on quick surfaces, grew more pronounced. Injuries cut into his rhythm. From 2016 onward, he played only three ODIs for India. In T20Is, he featured 32 times, but the returns were modest: 622 runs from 22 innings, averaging 25, with a strike-rate of 135 and just two fifties. Respectable numbers for a role player. Not enough to demand a World Cup berth in a side that was getting younger, fitter, and more specialised.

When the international tap dried up, Raina went back to the domestic grind, hoping weight of runs would force a rethink. The story there, too, is more nuanced than his memory suggests.

In 2017, across the Duleep Trophy and Ranji Trophy, he managed only 243 runs in 13 innings, averaging 18.69, with a single half-century. That’s not the profile of a batter banging down the national door. The next year brought a revival of sorts: 769 runs in 24 innings across the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, Vijay Hazare Trophy, Deodhar Trophy and Ranji Trophy, at an average of 36.62, with one century and seven fifties. Solid, competitive numbers.

The Vijay Hazare Trophy stood out. There he scored 208 runs in six innings at 41.60, with three fifties. Good enough to lead a state side. Not irresistible enough to overturn a national selection plan already moving in a different direction.

A career of firsts, and an abrupt last

Strip away the disappointment of the final years and Raina’s body of work still glows. He walked into the Indian team during the stormy Rahul Dravid–Greg Chappell period and survived the turbulence. From there, he became the anchor of India’s middle order in white-ball cricket, a player captains trusted when the chase got tight or the pitch turned tricky.

He was the first Indian to score centuries in all three formats, a marker of adaptability in an era when such versatility wasn’t taken for granted. In the 2011 World Cup, his cameos down the order — especially under pressure — were crucial to India’s title run. With the ball, he offered overs that broke partnerships. In the field, he set the standard. For a generation of young Indian cricketers, Raina was the template for how a modern fielder should move.

Yet the game moved faster than his second act. As India chased a more athletic, multi-dimensional XI and blooded a new wave of talent, there was little space for a 30-something batter whose strengths had started to fray at the edges.

Raina’s career promised more than it ultimately delivered in terms of longevity. But when Indian cricket looks back at the Dhoni and early Kohli years, his imprint will be there — in the middle-order grit, in the diving stops in the ring, in the idea that an Indian fielder could change a game on his own.

The scorecards will show when it ended. The memory of how brightly it burned at its peak will decide how long it’s remembered.