Suresh Raina’s international career is pretty much off the track now. Not very long ago, he was an indispensable part of India’s limited-overs teams and rightly so. However, a string of poor performances saw him lose his spot in the team and he is now nowhere close to regaining his place.
As things stand, Suresh Raina is well below in the pecking order and is nowhere close to earning a recall from the Indian team. The southpaw has played over 300 international games, but hasn’t represented India since July 2018. The selectors handed him a lifeline by naming him in the squad for the tour of England in 2018 as as Ambati Rayudu’s replacement for the England series after the former failed to clear the yo-yo test.
He was making a comeback through that series only but failed to make the chance count. He managed to score just 47 runs in the three-match ODI series and was immediately dropped. He is yet to receive a recall from the ODI team or the T20I team since then.
And as Suresh Raina is trying all he could to win his place back in the team, former Australia spinner Brad Hogg has written off his chances of returning to the national team. Hogg has opined that Raina’s India career is over and the probability of him making an international comeback is not possible. The former spinner backed his prediction by saying that India captain Virat Kohli is looking to promote youngsters in the team.
“But if you look at Indian line-up right now, where Virat Kohli wants to take it, he is looking at youngsters at the moment. And Shreyas Iyer has done reasonably well at no. 4, and that is where Raina is going to bat. I don’t see him batting lower down the order. He’s more of the batsman that comes in at no.3 or 4 and bats through the middle overs. I don’t think there is a role for him in Indian cricket,” Brad Hogg said on his YouTube channel.
The 49-year-old further said that the chances of Raina’s comeback depend only when another left-handed batsman Shikhar Dhawan is left out of the team.
“The only way he could get a chance to make a comeback in T20 cricket is if they continue to open with KL Rahul and Rohit Sharma and leave Shikhar Dhawan out so that he may have a slight chance there. But I don’t see Raina playing again, and that’s a little disappointing to say,” Hogg added.