Ruturaj Gaikwad's Raipur hundred turns up the heat on Shreyas Iyer even as India's ODI vice-captain holds the no.4 chair

Ruturaj Gaikwad scored a 77-ball hundred in Raipur, raising questions about Shreyas Iyer's position upon his return.

Ruturaj Gaikwad has finally punched a proper hole in the ODI door with a 77-ball hundred in Raipur, but the real question inside the Indian dressing room is simple: Does this actually move Shreyas Iyer out of the frame when he’s fit again?

Ruturaj Gaikwad scored 105 off 83 in the 2nd ODI against South Africa. (PTI)

This was Gaikwad’s first 50-plus score in ODIs in 803 days, and it has come in his second India appearance, 712 days after playing the last time. Before this South Africa series, he had just 123 runs in seven ODI innings with one fifty and five single-digit scores; even now, his overall ODI line reads 228 runs in 8 innings at an average of 28.50 with 1 hundred and 1 fifty. The gap between perception and numbers was massive - Raipur is the first time his domestic aura has truly shown up in a blue shirt.

A century that finally forced India to take him seriously

Gaikwad has not come from nowhere. In List A cricket has over 4,300 runs at an average above 56. Just last month, he was Player of the Series for India A against South Africa A, scoring 210 runs in three games, the most by any batter in that series.

Even then, his ODI return in Ranchi was brutal - 8 off 14 at number four, dismissed to a stunning catch by Dewald Brevis. Raipur is the counter-argument he desperately needed: coming in at 66/2, he soaked up the early squeeze, then went through the gears to a 77-ball century, building a monster stand with Virat Kohli and setting a stage for the Indian lower order.

At the selection table, this is not a fairy tale; its currency. From a numbers standpoint, one innings doesn’t fix his ODI record, but it proves two critical things: he can bat long in 50-overs cricket for India, and he can do it away from his preferred opening slot, in a pressure situation against a top side.

Shreyas Iyer still owns the chair

The brutal reality for Gaikwad is that Shreyas Iyer is not just another middle-order option. He is India’s ODI vice-captain and the man who has finally stabilised the long-cursed number four. At that position alone, Iyer has around 1,900 runs in 40-plus innings at an average of over 51, with a strike rate close to 100, four hundreds and 13 fifties, elite output for a modern ODI middle-order batter.

He is missing this South Africa series only because of the serious rib injury that saw his oxygen levels drop and kept him out of the squad; the management has been clear that he remains central once fully fit. On paper, that means when Iyer walks back in, he goes straight to number four, and Gaikwad is the easiest name to squeeze out of the XI.

So what has Raipur actually changed?

• Gaiwkad is no longer a “try him and see” pick - he becomes the first reserve across the top four in the ODI pecking order.
• He has shown that he can survive and then accelerate in the middle overs, which makes him a viable long-term no.3/no.4 candidate for post-Rohit, post-Kohli landscape.
• Most importantly, he has bought himself time: Even if he is benched when Iyer returns, it will now be harder to discard him after one failure.

In other words, this hundred doesn’t dethrone Shreyas Iyer. But in a format India quietly rebuild for 2027, it probably ensures that every future conversation about the next-generation core now has to now include Ruturaj Gaikwad’s name - and that alone makes Raipur matter.