Reliving the legend’s heavenly artry

The breathless deception of Bishan Singh Bedi began with him adjusting his turban, the colour getting brighter with the years and the wickets. He would roll the kada on his right hand upwards, as though it would disrupt his rhythm. He would toss the ball from one hand to the other, and would embark on his six-step diagonal run-up, with all the sweet time in the world, without fuss or haste, as though he floated to the crease. The movements were relaxed and graceful, leisurely and hypnotic. From the deep edge of the crease, he released the ball like a loose-limbed yogic, every cell choreographing and culminating in that action of gods. It was later that he developed the whiskey waline. The pivot was a pirouette, the follow-through is so smooth you wonder whether he had one at all.
Little wonder then that the legendary off-spinner Jim Laker once described his idea of cricketing heaven thus: “Lord’s Cricket Ground, bathed in sunshine, with Ray Lindwall bowling at one end and Bishan Bedi at one end.” Michael Holding, himself possessing one of the smoothest actions, called his action, “sheer poetry in motion.”

For the watcher, his bowling was akin to a heavenly experience. But for batsmen, it was slow-burning hell. His action stopped time, the ball in flight suspended time. The batsmen would wait for an eternity, with both fear and wonder, as the round object curled and curved into him, dulling his feet, hands and brain, taking him to a sense of drunkenness. But then, the ball explodes, it abruptly drops and turns viciously. In half a second, a benign red sphere became an object of violence. He turned from Gandhi to Terminator.
There are a few old footage of his escapades on YouTube. The most watchable one is where he picks five for 55 in Brisbane. All were left bewildered, even the seasoned Bob Simpson, who thought he would use the feel and smother his spin. He shimmied down the track and tried to hit him through cover, inside out, but the ball dropped alarmingly, turned and bit his outside edge to the hands of Sunil Gavaskar at first slip. Bedi’s own favourite was the wicket of Greg Chappell during a game between Rest of the World and Australia in 1971-72. The ball drifted into his middle stump, wind-assed, landed on middle and leg, before it spat past his outside edge to hit the off-stump.

His slowness deluded batsmen into believing that he could be dealt with using the feet. Mike Brearley in his college days, before playing the great man, once wrote in a newspaper that Bedi could be nullified using feet. He blasted his countrymen for playing him from the crease. When he eventually encountered him, next year when Bedi joined Northamptonshire and Brearley played for Middlesex, the Englishman stepped out to him in his first over, but was beaten in the flight and was stumped. “Like most great bowlers, his variation was subtle. Of all the slow bowlers of Bedi’s time, none forced you to commit yourself later than he did. The error of judgment induced in the batsman could be as much as a yard in length and a foot in width,” Brearley would later write in Wisden.
He was a master of subtlety., nuanced in the art of using the crease and adjusting his release points, which he often changed at the last possible seconds. The difference between his orthodox left-arm spinner and the arm-ball was often indecipherable. For the former, he would snap his wrs more and release the ball slightly higher. This was the relatively shorter of his ball too.
The arm-ball was slightly undercut, a bit quicker (not as quick as some of the modern-day practitioners though) and fuller. He would land the ball on middle stump, rather than outside the off-stump as he did with his stock ball. He could make it fizz, when he wanted. A case in point is the 1978 Sydney Test when Australia’s Kim Hughes charged out to him to launch him into the upper tier arcade and then to the straight boundary. Bedi slipped in his quickest armer next and it whizzed past the attempted cut to take out the off stump; Bedi would twirl around in joy and pump his f. But Bedi would resort to the variation only when he wanted to, not because he was wary of over-using it, but because he thought the orthodox tool sets sufficed.
Often forgotten in the aesthetics of his bowling was his accuracy of lengths and discipline. As is his arm-speed that got lost in the slow riffs of his bowling. He would often pound the same spot for overs on end—he still has the fourth-most economical figures in the ODIs (an unbelievable 12-8-6-1). WV Raman, the former India opener, tells a story from when Bedi was India’s manager in 1990, years after his retirement. At the nets, when the young spinners on tour Venkatapathy Raju and Narendra Hirwani tell him that there is no turn on offer, Bedi grabbed the ball, and spun out a batsman. “He then turned to the two spinners and said, “Boys! The ball won’t turn, you have to turn it!” Raman recalled on his YouTube channel. Most Read
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At the heart of his craft were his strong yet supple digits. The strength of his digits was accidental. Growing up in Amritsar, during the horrific partition time, his only past-time was playing marble with his friends. He was so fond of it that he became one of the deadliest marble players in his locality. He had a collection of close to ten thousand marbles too. Another habit too helped, that he always washed his own clothes.
Naturally, when he started bowling finger spin, after being dissuaded from bowling fast, the strong index finger would play a big role in getting the wickets and bowling tirelessly.
The technical robustness would make him a threat everywhere in the world. He averaged 27 in Australia, 24 in New Zealand and grabbed five-wicket hauls in every country, barring Pakan, that he had toured. But seldom are statics made to look more insufficient than when Bedi bowls. It was pure art, a forgotten one in this era of left-arm pragmats. And watching him, as the lucky generations have, was an idea of cricketing paradise as Laker described him.