Ambati Rayudu: The man who refuses to give up

If the ICL took him away from his India dreams, the IPL brought him back towards it

The transition and the comeback – from ICL to IPL

The second decade of the 21st century saw Rayudu's fortunes take a turn, as the most lucrative cricket league in the history of the sport washed away the blemishes of many a cricketer, including Rayudu, and filled the shores with hopes and employment. Since his debut for the Mumbai Indians, Rayudu has never aggregated less than 250 runs and has played at least 13 games for Mumbai in each season. A sparkling debut saw the top-order batsman score 356 runs from 14 games at 27.38 with 2 fifties, and he was retained for the next season, in 2011, wherein he bettered those stats by garnering 395 runs at 29.31 from 16 games with 4 fifties.

The decade also saw Rayudu plundering runs aplenty in the domestic circuit as well, as, in the 2010-11 season as well as the 2011-12 season, the batsman scored prolifically scoring 566 runs from 9 matches at 56.60 for Baroda and was their highest run-getter of the tournament as they finished runners-up in 2010-11 and went a step further in 2012-13, amassing 666 runs at 60.54. In addition to that, he was the top run-scorer of the 2012-13 Deodhar Trophy and also starred in the Irani Cup game the same year, wherein he scored 51 and 156* playing for Rest of India against Mumbai.

Amidst the run-fest, the Blue cap kept evading him time and again, as he was included in the list of 30 probables for the World T20 2012, but couldn't make it to the final 15, and was named as a replacement for MS Dhoni during the tri-series in the West Indies in 2013 but didn’t play a game. It took a second-string Indian side to finally help Rayudu earn his place in the national side, as he made his ODI debut during the one-day international series in Zimbabwe in July 2013, and the cricketer, after all the years of baiting himself in and out of contention, wasn’t the one to let the opportunity go.

Instead, he grabbed it with both hands and became the 12th Indian batsman to score a half-century on ODI debut as he finished unbeaten on 63 and guided his team to victory alongside the then captain, Virat Kohli. But such was the batsman’s fate, that his crests and troughs matched each other with an unmistakeable frequency. Rayudu retained his place in the squad post the Zimbabwe series for the limited-overs fixtures against Australia and West Indies at home, the same year, and against South Africa and New Zealand in 2013 and 2014 respectively. However, he managed to play only two games across the four series.

The 2014 ODI series against England put Rayudu in contention for a place in the full-strength Indian squad

The man who keeps coming back

An Asia Cup knock of 58 against Pakistan in 2014 saw him being picked for the bilateral series against Bangladesh but failed to impress there. Up until the first half of 2014, Ambati Rayudu was the epitome of a talent laid to waste – and that was for absolutely no mistake of his. The man, however, hadn’t learnt to give up. After the ignominy of the 3-1 series loss to England in the Pataudi Trophy in July 2014, India were in to save some pride in the ODI series against the English. Rayudu played two knocks of substance – 64* in the third ODI at Nottingham and 53 in the fifth ODI at Leeds – but was remembered less for these and more for his presence at the non-striker’s end – stranded on 3 runs off 5 balls – when his captain, MS Dhoni, failed to score 16 off the last over in the one-off T20I – denying Rayudu the strike twice in the over – at Birmingham on the same tour.

Following the withdrawal of the West Indies midway through the 2014 home tour, a second-string Sri Lanka came in to fill in for BCCI’s ambitions, and Rayudu, sniffing the opportunity, embraced it gratefully by registering his maiden ODI ton – 121 in the 2nd ODI at Ahmedabad – to help the board fuel its ego and whitewash the Lankans in a no-holds-barred series. Consequently, Rayudu played his maiden 50-over World Cup in 2015, at least from the benches, as he was picked in the 15-man squad but never played a game. By now, the man from Guntur had realised that the luck, or the lack thereof, that had brought him so far was going to be the one to take him even further.

So he persevered and was rewarded with (guess what?) another second-string tour to Zimbabwe, wherein he was adjudged as the man of the series for his knocks of 124 and 41 in the first two ODIs of the three-match series. A full-strength series awaited, as the Proteas came for a full tour of 3 T20I, 5 ODIs, and 4 Tests, and Rayudu did the usual. He warmed the beach, perhaps looking at the field as his perceived vantage point. With all these stutters and stumbles, one would not expect him to have a record that he has. From 34 ODIs, Rayudu has 1055 runs at 50.23 and a strike rate of 76. In the recently concluded series against Zimbabwe, he became the 4th fastest Indian batsman to reach 1000 ODI runs, only behind Virat Kohli, Navjot Sidhu, and Shikhar Dhawan.

He takes catches, throws himself around the field, bats wherever he is required to, and can keep wickets if needed. He isn’t Rahul Dravid, yes, but if India have to nurture another Dravid, they’d feel that they’re already a bit late.