Rahane signs off at 38, three years after his last Test for India
Ajinkya Rahane announced his retirement from all forms of cricket on Thursday, closing a 12-year international career and an IPL run that ran from 2008 to this year’s KKR captaincy.
Jul 30, 2026
Ajinkya Rahane last batted for India in Port of Spain in July 2023, in a Test that rain washed out on the final day and that almost nobody remembers. The formal goodbye came three years later, on Thursday, in a video posted to social media under a caption that did the work of a much longer statement: “Cap 278 signing off.”
He is 38, and this one covers everything. International cricket, the IPL, the domestic seasons he kept fronting up for long after the national selectors had stopped ringing. “I have always relied on timing in my batting and have always understood its importance,” he said in the message. “Today, I feel the timing is right for me to move on.”
An average that argues against him
Eighty-five Tests, 5,077 runs at 38.46, 12 hundreds and 26 fifties, a highest score of 188. Add 2,962 ODI runs at 35.26 from 90 games and 375 in 20 T20Is, and you have the statistical case that trailed Rahane around for a decade. Set against the batters he shared a middle order with, those numbers read as good rather than great.
They also flatten the thing that made him worth picking. Rahane’s best work came on the tours where India’s totals used to fall apart: 118 at the Basin Reserve in Wellington in 2014, then 103 at Lord’s a few months later after India had slumped to 145 for 7, an innings that set up a first win at the ground in 28 years. For a stretch in the middle of the last decade he was the batter India sent out when the ball was moving and the scoreboard read three down for not many.
Six Tests as captain, none of them lost
Rahane led India in six Tests and finished with four wins and two draws. No defeats, and a fortnight in Australia that will be replayed for as long as anyone talks about that tour.
He got the job at the worst possible moment. India had been bowled out for 36 in Adelaide, Virat Kohli had flown home for the birth of his child, and the tour looked finished. Rahane walked in at 64 for 3 at Melbourne with Australia’s 195 already on the board and made 112 from 223 balls, becoming the first India captain since Sachin Tendulkar in 1999 to score a hundred at the MCG. India built a first-innings lead of 131 and won the Test.
Sydney was drawn. Then, in January 2021, India won at the Gabba by three wickets, on a ground where Australia had not lost since 1988, and took the series 2-1. Rahane captained once more, at Kanpur against New Zealand in November that year, and that draw was the end of it.
The franchise career that outlasted the international one
His IPL record ran far longer than his India one. Rahane finished with 212 matches and 5,367 runs at 30.15, striking at 125.60, with two hundreds, 35 fifties and a best of 105 not out, across six franchises since 2008.
The last of those seasons was also his last innings. He captained Kolkata Knight Riders through IPL 2026 and signed off in the final league game against Delhi Capitals at Eden Gardens with a 39-ball 63, four fours and four sixes, before Kuldeep Yadav got him. KKR lost by 40 runs in a match that decided nothing. Odd way for a career like this to finish, though the innings itself was a fair summary of the batter: unhurried, sharp when it needed to be, and gone before anyone had quite finished watching.