From Adelaide's Darkest Hour to Gabba Glory: The Redemption Arc That Defined Ajinkya Rahane

Add as a preferred source on Google

There is a version of Ajinkya Rahane's career that ends at 36 all out.

It's December 2020, Day 3 of the first Test at Adelaide Oval. Australia's pink-ball lights are on, and India - set to defend a lead - implode. Bumrah gifts a return catch. Pujara goes for a duck. Then Agarwal, Rahane, Kohli, Saha, Ashwin, Vihari - a procession. India are bowled out for 36, their lowest Test total in history, a number so absurd that Twitter didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Josh Hazlewood takes 5 for 8. Australia chase down the target in under an hour.

Photo Credit: Instagram: @ajinkyarahane

If the story stopped there, Rahane's Test career might be remembered very differently. But it didn't stop there. Because 36 hours later, captain Virat Kohli flew home for the birth of his daughter - and handed the reins of a shattered, humiliated touring party to his soft-spoken deputy.

What Rahane did next is the reason his name will outlast most of his numbers.

"That Topic Should Not Be Discussed At All"

Rahane's first act as stand-in captain wasn't a tactical masterstroke. It was psychological triage. Speaking to Marathi daily Sakal years later, he recalled the instruction he gave the dressing room: the Adelaide collapse was not to be discussed at all - it wasn't a mistake, just something that happens once in a century, and the team needed to move on because the next Test was three days away.

It sounds simple. It wasn't. This was a squad that had just posted the most humiliating total in the history of Indian cricket, without their best batter, without their first-choice pace attack for large stretches, and now without their captain too. Rahane's message, relayed later to Harsha Bhogle, was almost defiantly forward-looking: stop talking about Adelaide, start thinking about Melbourne - the conversation from here was only ever about how the team would come back.

The Boxing Day Statement

Three days after 36 all out, Rahane walked out at the MCG and played the innings that so many former players still call the turning point of his career: a composed hundred that steadied a team that had every reason to fold. It wasn't the flashiest century of his life - it didn't need to be. It was the innings of a captain telling his own dressing room, through bat rather than words, that the horror show at Adelaide was already history.

Not everyone agrees Melbourne was the pivotal moment, and that's part of what makes this story so rich. Former pacer Vivek Razdan has argued the real turning point was Adelaide itself - the shared humiliation that forced the team to find out what it was made of. For Razdan, the defining moment of the series was the 36 all out at Adelaide - the point where India, disoriented and hurting, discovered the fight that carried them through the rest of the tour. Ravi Shastri's message to the squad captured the same idea more bluntly - that a collapse like 36 all out happens once in a lifetime and would never happen again, and the team atmosphere in its wake was, remarkably, a positive one.

A Series Built on Broken Pieces

What makes the Border-Gavaskar triumph of 2020-21 remarkable isn't just that India won - it's what they won with. Injuries piled up test by test. A rookie Test squad, missing frontline names, kept finding replacements who rose to the occasion - most famously a young wicketkeeper named Rishabh Pant, drafted into the XI as a tactical fix for a left-hand gap in the top six, who would go on to play the two most audacious innings of the series.

Through it all, Rahane was the connective tissue - not the loudest voice, not the most destructive bat, but the one constant sense of calm. He led from the front with the bat when it mattered most, then quietly ceded the spotlight to the youngsters he'd back into big moments. By the time Pant swept India to a three-wicket win at the Gabba - ending a 32-year drought at the venue and sealing a 2-1 series victory - the image of Adelaide's 36 all out had been almost entirely rewritten.

Almost. Because Rahane never let anyone forget it happened. He simply refused to let it define what came after.

The Kohli Run-Out He Never Talks About Lightly

There's a footnote to Adelaide that Rahane has revisited more than any other moment of his career - and it isn't the century that followed. It's a mix-up on Day 1 of that same Test that ran Kohli out for 74, ending an 88-run stand and triggering the collapse that would follow two days later. Rahane later admitted the guilt from that moment stayed with him through the rest of the innings: his mind kept returning to the run-out, and it dented his focus for the remainder of the Test, though Kohli told him to move on and put it behind him.

It's a small, human detail that undercuts the easy hero narrative - and makes the comeback that followed land even harder. Rahane didn't lead India back from Adelaide despite feeling responsible for part of the disaster. He led them back while carrying that weight.

Why This Is the Story Rahane's Retirement Deserves

Cricket will remember Rahane's numbers - 85 Tests, over 8,000 international runs, a solitary IPL title with Chennai Super Kings after six franchises. But numbers don't explain why a modest, undemonstrative batter from Dombivli became one of Indian cricket's most trusted names in a crisis.

Adelaide-to-Gabba does that. It's the series where Rahane's entire cricketing identity - calm, understated, immovable under pressure - was tested at its most extreme and came through. Not with a defiant press conference. Not with fiery captaincy. Just with a hundred at the MCG, a quiet instruction to stop talking about the collapse, and the conviction to keep backing a patched-together team until it delivered a series win that ranks among Indian cricket's greatest.

As Rahane signs off - "Cap 278, signing off," in his own words - that's the series most fans will replay first. Not because it was his most prolific. Because it was the one where Indian cricket needed someone to absorb the worst day in its history and simply refuse to let it be the last word.