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There was bound to come a time when better sense had to prevail. For far too long has Ravichandran Ashwin been kept out of matches and tournaments that have mattered. Reasons have ranged between typical and grossly inaccurate—an additional seamer was necessary, a slow left-arm bowler would have better prospects or just plainly, he wasn’t good enough as a batter. All pretty flimsy reasons to keep your best spinner—also the world’s best in Tests—on the bench. Till it came down to a World Cup, at home nonetheless, and a freak injury to Axar Patel to overturn what would have been a grave misjudgement.
Ashwin may or may not perform to expectations. But here’s why he is indispensable to India’s World Cup aspirations.
First and foremost, it’s at home, where Ashwin commands supercomputer like analysis of every venue, not only the pitch or turf but also details like overhead conditions, drainage, boundary lengths to even how curators like to tend to their surfaces. In short, he has the pulse of every ground.
Secondly, the match-up with left-handed batters is a no-brainer really. Ball spinning away creates angles for edges to wicketkeepers and catches to slip but with Ashwin the scope widens admirably. Trust him to loop in the ball and straighten, trapping the overzealous batter leg-before. An arm ball, on the other hand, can squeeze the life out of a backfoot drive.
Nobody wants to talk about the matchup with right-handed batters because it’s somehow assumed playing with the spin is easy. But Ashwin from round the wicket makes it that much harder by pitching it straighter and getting batters off-balance.
To this add the leg-side trap that Ashwin had exploited so well in Australia, and you might be prompted to rethink the potential of this matchup, provided of course you want to be aggressive. And Ashwin is aggressive, not because he is always looking for wickets, but because he is relentless.
He is what WV Raman affectionately calls a typical ‘Mambalam boy’—Mambalam is a cricket-crazy Chennai locality where some residents play second-division cricket even in their 60s—who lives and breathes the game and is bent on improving his craft every day. Which is the primary reason why Ashwin’s transition to Test from white-ball cricket (he first made an impression during the 2010 IPL, remember?) was so seamless.
This is VVS Laxman recalling watching Ashwin for the first time: “It was in the 2008 Duleep Trophy, when we were playing against Central Zone,” he had said on TV during the New Zealand tour in 2021.
“I never felt he was a bowler for Test match cricket. With the flatter trajectory and the fast speed he used to bowl, I felt he could play white-ball cricket but not Test matches. But if you see now, he has five or six options. He used his cricket smartness and because of that, he has taken so many wickets in his career till now.”
It’s true Ashwin sometimes tries to do many things in an over. The carrom ball, the arm ball, top spin and the side spin are the variations batters would end up facing but behind that works another subset of alterations—differing drift and pace, positioning from the crease, release points and switched load-ups all adequately masked in changes of pace. Ashwin questions batters the same way he asks himself. And that stems from a mindset that isn’t ready to be bound by the benchmark.
“The thing that struck me about Ashwin was that he had a very active mind. He would ask a lot of things,” Raman, Ashwin’s former coach, had told HT when Ashwin had completed 10 years in Test cricket. “One needed to understand that because it’s so easy for people to get—let’s say—a little bit irritated at times. It’s important to understand each and every individual is wired differently. The other thing about Ashwin was that he was never short of confidence.”
India need that confidence to forge ahead. India need that unfailing aggression even in the face of imminent defeat. And Ashwin may be key to that mindset.
The version of Ashwin you see now—a no-nonsense upholder of the once discredited method of bowler running out the non-striker, or the batter willing to retire himself during an IPL innings—is indicative of a mind that thinks beyond the box while preserving the tenets of spin bowling. He is a phenomenal bowler. But Ashwin is also a reservoir of information waiting to be tapped, a natural leader and a team man to the core. If the 2019 World Cup, countless tours of England and the 2023 World Test Championship final haven’t vindicated not picking Ashwin, this World Cup may well go on to create a different narrative.
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