Baith and Bol, a fun interactive cricket based discussion that’s being exclusively presented by Crex and brought out by Lava is an engaging concept that talks about the close moments, intricacies and exciting periods of time concerned with various Indian Cricketers. These can be past and present day cricketers and one of their hopefully closely watched episodes in the near future will revolve around a talent that’s still very much respected in and around India: Suresh Raina.

The former Indian cricketer most recently sat down with Aakash Chopra as he opened up about a myriad subjects connected to his brilliant and sparkling international career, that saw many flying moments as far as the white ball set up was concerned.

That being said, Aakash Chopra, in particular, asked Raina about the last few seasons of his career. That’s where something interesting and perhaps rather telling happened to the man considered as an all time great fielder among the other things!

It is a matter of fact that despite clearing the then Yo-yo test, an important constituent of the fitness test for Indian athletes, for some reason the brilliant Suresh Raina was still not considered a part of the Indian side and was left out.


So Aakash Chopra asked Raina about his experience and mindset about what had happened and that time and went down the memory road. To this response, the following is how Raina happened to explain that story:

“Every captain has his own team! Different captains have different preferences or likings towards the talent available at their disposal and they tend to pick from that.”

Chopra then further asked Raina his views on whether Dhoni’s departure from captaincy and the fact that many senior players who departed around that same time happened to have any synchronicity in that matter? To this Raina had the following insights to share:

“When Yuvraj Singh and I played together at that times, we cleared the Yo Yo test as well. Scored lots of runs at the domestic level. I was in fact even the man of the tournament in South Africa in the 2018 series. But then with the 2019 World Cup, perhaps then other batters got some preference. So it’s a mindset.”

He would further add, “I did ask many questions at that time regarding myself but never got any answers!”

It certainly seems that this upcoming episode on Baith & Bol will be a commendable one and can bring up something interesting to see connected to the career of one of Indian cricket’s very loyal servants and someone we are yet to fully appreciate in all these years.