I won’t give you masala on captaincy: Rahane

Chennai: When he faced the media in a video-conference today, Ajinkya Rahane had a fair idea that a question about his indifferent form would pop up. He met the challenge head-on with a never-seen-before aggression. “See we are playing at home after two years. Our last home series was against South Africa. If you take (the scores of that series) out, you will find something over there,” Rahane answered in third person with a deadpan expression, referring to his scores of 59 and 115 against South Africa in that series in 2019. He has scored 1,002 runs in his last 15 Test matches. “It’s all about the team and not the individual and my focus is how can I contribute for the team. If you take out the last 10-15 Test matches, you will see some runs over there,” he said. “I don’t need to think about what’s happening on the outside.”

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Rahane, for a change, was not ready to take a backward step when faced with difficult questions. When a scribe asked him if the “drooping shoulders and negative body language” in the first Test were due to a change in captaincy, he was far from amused. “There are moments when you don’t have that energy but that doesn’t mean that it has happened because of a change in captaincy. As I have said earlier, Virat is our captain and will remain our captain,” Rahane said testily. “If you are trying to dig in and find some ‘masala’ (controversy), unfortunately you will not get it. Look, body language can be a bit down at times and the wicket was such in the first two days, it could be because of that. There could be many reasons.” Agencies, TNS