The Art of Ashwin

Bedi teased batsmen. Pras was a master of anticipation. Chandra was magic. Precise Venkat was surgeon-like. But Ashwin is perhaps more calculatingly intelligent in approach than all these greats

A phenomenal international cricket career has come to an end with R Ashwin’s announcement of his retirement from the game at that level. Why has he done that in the middle of an ongoing series? From someone who has never backed away from a challenge, this has indeed been a surprising decision with the current Test series still evenly poised, and the World Test Championship not yet a lost cause for India. Did he know that he would not be part of India’s plan for the fourth and fifth Tests? Or as Sunil Gavaskar wondered aloud, has the experience of being so frequently benched despite being the world’s leading spinner begun to rankle?

I believe the horses-for-courses theory is sometimes overrated. No matter what the playing conditions, India fielded three of the four spinners that made up the famed quartet in match after match, series after series, at home and away right up to the end of the 1970s. By the same token,Ashwin should have walked into the playing XI every time India played a Test match. Former India captain MAK Pataudi once said that off-spinner S Venkataraghavan would have been a permanent fixture in the Indian XI as an all-rounder even with rival EAS Prasanna walking in ahead of him into the side, if only Venkat had focused more on his batting. With six Test hundreds—including match-winning or match-saving knocks—under his belt, Ashwin did not have to prove his all-rounder status to anyone. Unfortunately for him, Ravindra Jadeja proved better than him in at least one department—that of his spectacular fielding—and that made him the favourite for the sole spinner slot in overseas Test matches. I believe however that in at least half of the matches India went in with four seamers, the side would have been better served with both Ashwin and Jadeja in the playing XI at the expense of one of the pacers.

I have often confessed that it was not love at first sight between me and Ashwin’s bowling. This is hardly the time to go into my initial not-so-positive reaction to the stylistics of his craft. Suffice it to say that I am today, like, many leading commentators and countless fans of his cricket, an unabashed admirer. I shall only say this much in this context: Ashwin has been a fearless experimenter all through his career, but I suspect that the gradual streamlining of his bowling action has also meant greater preoccupation with consistency at the cost of variety, with a parallel enhancement in the extent of his overseas successes (when not benched). Who else among international bowlers has exhibited the steel to ignore carping criticism the way Ashwin has through his career, calmly working all along on improving his record away from India?

I cannot think of a world-class batsman that has mastered Ashwin. Here, I may be straddling red-ball and Twenty20 cricket. Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne, David Warner, Travis Head, Ben Stokes, Chris Gayle…they have all struggled against his wiles. In his approach to Ashwin, even Root has not been quite as confident as he is generally known to be. And when was the last time Gayle dominated Ashwin? Did he ever? As for lesser mortals like Bairstow or Head, they can look silly right in the middle of a purple patch when foxed by Ashwin’s bag of tricks real or imagined.

Ashwin recently stated that he has learnt to compartmentalise his batting and his bowling. As I understand him, while he likes to visualise a scenario of successive deliveries often based on his mental database of the batsman’s strengths and weaknesses, he has gained greatly by focusing on one ball at a time while batting. This reminded me of my own likening in a podcast of the way Ashwin seems to think through his bowling to a chess player’s moves. Prasanna was a master of anticipating a batsman’s responses to his bowling wares and trapping him through subtle deceit. Bishan Singh Bedi teased the batsman into error, tempting him with one kind of delivery and surprising him afterwards with a wickedly different offering. BS Chandrasekhar was magic, pure and simple. Venkat’s precise, probing ways were compared to a surgeon wielding his scalpel. But Ashwin is perhaps more calculatingly intelligent in his approach than all these greats.

Ashwin is 38, but he looks fit and fresh enough to continue breaking records as a leading all-rounder in top flight cricket over the next couple of years. One of the most cerebral cricketers around, he would have probably made a successful India captain had he been offered the mantle. Active in social media, he demonstrates exceptional people skills while interacting with teammates and colleagues. Be all that as it may, this is an emotion-surcharged moment for followers of Indian, even world cricket. We say goodbye with a heavy heart to one of the greats of all time to have adorned international cricket. 

Chennai-based V Ramnarayan bowled off-spin for Hyderabad. His 7-68 against Bombay in the 1975-76 Ranji Trophy quarter-final went in vain

Clayton Murzello’s Pavilion End column will be back next week.

The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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