A great many of the batting artists of our age - Virender Sehwag, Damien Martyn, VVS Laxman - bat in a way that makes us admire the work of their hands rather than their feet. Batting was traditionally was thought to begin with, and indeed rest upon, a batsman's footwork. But the thickness and striking force of modern-day bats sometimes makes precise footwork redundant. Where ten years ago a batsman would push a good-length ball on the front foot to cover, he now stays put and flays the ball through point; even tail-enders now happily manage this. It has been a pleasure, then, to watch the two splendid half-centuries made over the last week at Faridabad and at Goa by young Suresh Raina, and to observe how much his batting owes to his supremely light feet.
Unusually, the swiftness of Raina's footwork is visible less is his play to his spinners - although he is good here - than in two or three of his strokes to the quicker bowlers.
One is his drive on the up to seam bowling. Usually a batsman essaying this stroke makes a large stride forward to get his weight into the stroke "on the rise". Distinctively, Raina seems somehow to manages one-and-a-half steps instead of one - in reaching forward he makes a delicious little shimmy that takes him a metre or two out of his crease in his follow-through. Thus he often converts length balls into drivable ones. This shot, and his sumptuous cover-drive, are Raina's two most attractive strokes.
Another shot that calls attention to itself is Raina's flick through midwicket, which he often plays by quickly skipping across his stumps after he has judged the line of the ball (this stroke bears a slight resemblance to Sachin Tendulkar's signature flick behind square-leg). Not many left-handed batsmen - among contemporary cricketers one thinks only of Graeme Smith - play with any felicity through midwicket with a straight bat, so Raina is unusual in this.
And the little pick-up shot he plays to fine-leg off the quicks - one remembers the look on Kabir Ali's face when he was caught by surprise by this stroke last week at Faridabad - is similarly brought off by a quick last-second shimmy across the stumps, the only difference being that this is usually premeditated.
A hint at the strengths of Raina's batting has actually been broadcast all of this season by his superlatively assured and predatory fielding. He seems always beautifully balanced while attacking the ball, and covers huge swathes of ground left and right in whichever position he is fielding. When a ball is hit to him he gives off the sense that he would like every delivery in the rest of the innings to be hit in his direction as well. Already he is the most influential member of the team when India are on the field.
One feels - I accept that this is only conjecture - that Raina might end up as a more successful Test batsman than either Yuvraj Singh or Mohammad Kaif, the two other chosen successors to the Tendulkar-Ganguly-Laxman generation. Raina's batting, while very attractive, is more compact and secure than that of Yuvraj (just watch Raina move in defence forward and back). While he is not such a natural striker of the ball as his fellow left-hander, neither does he jab and fence at the ball with no feet as Yuvraj often does. He is a more limited but a more industrious player than Yuvraj.
Nor does his batting possess the ugly unnatural lines and extreme nervous tension of Kaif's game, which makes batting look more difficult than it should be and lends itself to all kinds of errors. Of course, a great deal more is required to succeed in Test cricket than just good technique. But from the evidence of his fledgling career it would seem that Raina is not short of any of these other gifts either.
