Ajinkya Rahane and India's 2020-21 Series Win in Australia

On the morning of 19 December 2020 India were 9 for 1 in Adelaide, six runs behind Australia with nine wickets standing and a Test to save. Eighty minutes later they were all out for 36, the lowest total in their history, and nobody had reached double figures. The match was over inside three days. Virat Kohli flew home the following week on paternity leave, Mohammed Shami had a fractured forearm, and the man left in charge had never captained India in an away Test.

What Rahane inherited

The scale of the problem is easy to understate now that the ending is known. India were 1-0 down in a four-match series against a side ranked above them, without their captain and best batter, without their most reliable overseas fast bowler, and carrying the memory of an innings that had lasted 21.2 overs. Australia had not lost a Test at the Gabba since 1988. Nothing about the fixture list offered a way back.

Ajinkya Rahane had led India before, in one-off situations, and had a reputation as a stand-in rather than a candidate. He was also, at that point, a batter under pressure for his own place. His previous eighteen months had produced few scores and a good deal of speculation about whether the middle order needed rebuilding around younger players.

What he had instead was seniority in a very specific sense. Rahane had toured Australia twice before, in 2014-15 and 2018-19, and had made hundreds on both trips. He knew the venues, the bounce and the way an Australian crowd works on a visiting side. Whatever else was uncertain, he was not going to be surprised by the conditions.

Melbourne, and the innings that changed the series

India made four changes for the Boxing Day Test. Two of them were debuts: Shubman Gill opened and Mohammed Siraj took the new ball. Ravindra Jadeja came in. The team sheet looked less like a settled Test side than a squad list, and it was picked by a captain who had held the job for four days.

Australia made 195. Jasprit Bumrah and Ravichandran Ashwin took three wickets each, and Siraj two on debut. India then lost three wickets before the deficit was cleared, which is precisely the passage in which the series could have ended. Rahane came in at 61 for 2 and batted for the rest of the day and most of the next.

His 112 was not a spectacular innings and it was not meant to be. He scored at a shade under fifty runs per hundred balls, played very straight, and left almost everything he was entitled to leave. What it did was give India a first-innings lead of 131 on a pitch where 195 had already looked like a competitive total. India won by eight wickets with a day to spare. Rahane took the player-of-the-match award and the series was level.

The captaincy detail people remember from that match is not the hundred but a field placement. Rahane kept attacking fields for longer than the situation strictly demanded, in an innings where a defensive ring would have been the conventional choice, and India took wickets in clumps as a result. It became the template for the remaining two Tests: a side without its best players cannot afford to wait for mistakes.

The Sydney draw, and the cost of it

The third Test at the SCG was the strangest match of the four. Australia made 338, India replied with 244, and by the fourth evening India were being asked to bat out more than a day to survive. Rishabh Pant made 97 in a counter-attack that briefly suggested a chase of 407 was possible, and Cheteshwar Pujara made 77 in the way he usually did, which is to say slowly and without a hint of interest in the scoreboard.

The last session belonged to Hanuma Vihari and Ashwin. Hanuma Vihari had torn a hamstring and could barely run; Ashwin had a back spasm severe enough that he needed help to get out of bed the following morning. Between them they faced 258 balls for 62 runs and did not lose a wicket. India finished on 334 for 5. It was, by any reasonable measure, one of the better rearguards played by a touring side in Australia.

The match also produced the ugliest incident of the tour, when Siraj reported racial abuse from a section of the crowd on the fourth day and play was stopped while the offenders were removed. Rahane's handling of that, in public and in the dressing room, was one of the quieter arguments in favour of his leadership.

The price of the draw was the squad. India went to Brisbane without Ashwin, Vihari, Bumrah, Jadeja and Umesh Yadav, on top of the absences they already had. The bowling attack that took the field at the Gabba had four Test caps between them.

The Gabba, and a chase nobody expected

Australia made 369 in the first innings. Siraj took 2 for 77 and Shardul Thakur 3 for 94, and India replied with 336, a total built largely on a seventh-wicket stand of 123 between Thakur and Washington Sundar, both of whom were playing because there was nobody else.

Then Siraj took 5 for 73, his first five-wicket haul in Test cricket, and Australia were bowled out for 294. India needed 328 on the final day on a pitch in its fifth session of wear. They did not block. Gill made 91 from 146 balls, Pujara took the body blows and made 56 from 211, and Pant finished the match unbeaten on 89. The winning runs came with three overs left. Australia's unbeaten run at the ground, which had lasted thirty-two years, ended against a side missing most of its first-choice XI.

Tim Paine resigned nothing and lost nothing in the standings, but the series result stood at 2-1 and the wider consequence was a place in the inaugural final of the 2019-2021 World Test Championship. Pat Cummins took 21 wickets and was named player of the series, which was fair; Australia were the better side for most of the four Tests and lost anyway.

What Rahane's captaincy record does and does not show

Rahane captained India in six Tests across several years and never lost one. Four were won and two were drawn. It is a striking line, and it comes with an obvious caveat: six matches is a very small sample, and three of them were played in circumstances so unusual that no template can be drawn from them.

The more useful observation concerns method. Rahane's sides attacked when a draw was available, kept slips in for longer than the run rate justified, and used part-time options earlier than most India captains would have. That was partly personality and partly necessity, because a bowling attack of debutants cannot dry up an innings and has to be aimed at wickets. It also happened to align with the approach Kohli had spent five years establishing, which is why the 2020-21 result reads as a continuation rather than a departure.

Set against that is what happened afterwards. Rahane did not become India's captain. Kohli returned for the home series against England in February 2021 and Rahane went back to being the vice-captain and the No. 5, and within eighteen months he was out of the side altogether. A tour result of that size would have secured most captains a longer run. It did not secure him one, mainly because his own scoring did not recover.

The runs, and the honest accounting

Outside the Melbourne hundred, Rahane's own contribution across the four Tests was modest. He passed fifty once. The rest were starts that ended in the twenties and thirties, which had by then become the recurring criticism of him: a batter capable of important innings in difficult conditions who converted too few of them.

That is worth saying plainly because the alternative version, in which the captain carried the batting, is not true. India's runs on that tour came from Pant, Gill, Pujara and a tail that batted far above itself. What Rahane provided was one innings that decided the direction of the series and a set of decisions across three matches that were, at minimum, not wrong.

Why the tour still matters

The 2020-21 series changed what India expected of themselves abroad. Before it, a squad depleted by injury toured to limit damage. After it, the assumption was that the reserve players were Test cricketers rather than cover. Siraj and Sundar became fixtures on the back of it, Gill became an opener, Thakur got a decade of selection credit, and the idea that India's fast-bowling depth ran eight or nine deep stopped being a claim and became an observation.

It also settled a longer argument about the rivalry with Australia. India had won there once before, in 2018-19, against a side missing Steve Smith and David Warner. The 2020-21 result came against a full-strength Australia including Steve Smith, which removed the last reasonable objection to the previous win. Two consecutive series victories in Australia had not been managed by any visiting side since the West Indies of the 1980s.

For the wider story of Indian cricket, the tour sits alongside 1971 and 1983 as one of the results that shifted what the team believed was available to it. That is a large claim for four matches in an empty-ish summer during a pandemic, played in bio-secure hotels with restricted crowds. It happens to hold up.

Rahane's Test career carried on for another two and a half years and did not produce many more days like Melbourne. It did not need to. Most captains who win a series in Australia do it with their best side available; he did it with roughly half of one, and the record of six Tests without defeat, whatever its sample size, is the shortest way of saying so.