“It’s not very difficult for me,” Raichandani told Cricinfo ahead of the second four-dayer in Ahmedabad. “If you get three or four net sessions before moving into a format, you gradually regain the touch and tempo required for it. The technical adjustment is a little more when you move into red-ball cricket, but the biggest change in any format is the mindset.
“Conditions are different in every format, and your intent has to change accordingly. You cannot play every ball in the same manner in different formats.”
“After playing senior cricket, Under-19 cricket feels a bit easier for me. In senior cricket, there is much more planning and bowlers try to dismiss batters with specific plans. There is more maturity and experience at that level”
Lakshya Raichandani
Raichandani is not yet 18 but his maturity is evident not only in his batting but also in the way he speaks about the game.
“After playing senior cricket, Under-19 cricket feels a bit easier for me,” Raichandani, the right-hand opening batter, said. “There is a huge difference between senior cricket and age-group cricket. In senior cricket, there is much more planning and bowlers try to dismiss batters with specific plans. There is more maturity and experience at that level. In Under-19 cricket, there isn’t as much planning. You can say that one of the reasons behind these big scores is that I have some experience of senior cricket as well.”
Raichandani has been producing big scores in Under-19 cricket for a while now.
“It was a very good experience because the conditions were very different there,” he said. “Most importantly, all our matches were played at international venues. The pitches offered a lot more assistance to spinners and there was not much in them for the fast bowlers. During the practice sessions, we first adapted to the conditions and then got ourselves ready for the matches. We made plans on how to pick the spinners and what kind of intent we wanted to show against them.
“If we tour Sri Lanka again in the future, we will know what sort of preparation is required to do well there. Overall, such tours are very helpful for our development.”
Raichandani hails from Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh, neighbouring Uttarakhand, who he plays for. His paternal grandfather, Tulsidas Raichandani, moved to India soon after the partition of the country in 1947 and later entered politics, even serving as a member of the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly on two occasions.
Tulsidas’s son, Rajesh, has also dabbled in politics at the district level but making the younger of his two sons a cricketer was always high on his agenda.
“When Lakshya was five, we bought him a bat as a toy. He had other toys as well, but once he got the bat, he hardly touched any of them again,” Rajesh said. “He used to practise batting on his own by hitting a ball against a wall. As he grew older, we hung a ball from the roof with a rope, and he would spend hours batting with that. That was when I felt I should train him properly. When he turned eight, we enrolled him in a local academy.”
After doing the rounds of the local academies as well as ones in Delhi, they chose the GNG Academy in Haldwani in Uttarakhand, which explains Raichandani playing his senior cricket for the state.
Raichandani enjoyed a remarkable 2023-24 Under-16 Vijay Merchant Trophy season, scoring 833 runs in seven innings at an average of 138.33. His tally included four centuries and two half-centuries and was the highest that season
“The first couple of years were very difficult for us because it is not easy to keep a young child away from his mother,” Rajesh said. “But once he started scoring heavily in the finals of district and state-level tournaments and made it into Uttarakhand’s Under-16 team, we gradually stopped worrying as much.”
Raichandani enjoyed a remarkable 2023-24 Under-16 Vijay Merchant Trophy season, scoring 833 runs in seven innings at an average of 138.33. His tally included four centuries and two half-centuries and was the highest that season. He earned the Jagmohan Dalmiya Award at the 2025 BCCI Naman Awards for his performance. During the same tournament, he also picked up 13 wickets in eight innings with his offspin.
The following year, he became part of Uttarakhand’s Under-19 and Under-23 sides when he was just 17. Then, in the 2025-26 season, he made his first-class debut. Since then, he has been a regular member of the India Under-19 team and has also taken on leadership responsibilities in the different (four-day and one-day) squads.
Raichandani has experienced a fair share of success at a very young age. However, he understands that he must guard against complacency and is not looking too far ahead. For now, his attention is on the upcoming Ranji Trophy season, which will follow the Under-19 series. The ultimate aim remains, like it is for most cricketers moving up the ranks, a Test cap. And he is willing to work his way to that target.
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