R Ashwin: The off-spinner who extricated his craft from the web of doosras and mystery deliveries | Cricket News

In the grand pantheon of India’s spinners, Ravichandran Ashwin would inhabit a rarified space, all unto himself. There have been wizards and magicians, arts and artisans, but few explored the craft with the zeal of a scient, the curiosity of a child, or the industry of a sculptor like Ashwin. He was the greatest off-spinner his country has seen — and among the finest the world has produced, rubbing shoulders with Muttiah Muralitharan and Jim Laker, Harbhajan Singh and Ashwin’s own contemporary Nathan Lyon.
His biggest legacy — apart from the numerical peaks — was how he re-instilled the lost mystique to the art form. He did not glamorise the field like Shane Warne did leg-spin, or romanticise it like Muralitharan, or revolutionise it like Saqlain Mushtaq, but he instilled the soul back in off-spin bowling, made it a riveting spectacle again, liberating it from the dubious doosra and mystery fixation of the aughts, expanded its scope and range, tessellated more layers, embellished it with post-modern syntax and diction. So much so that he is off-spin’s renaissance man. There would be a clear demarcation as to how off-spin was before and after Ashwin.
He was a classic in a neo-classical age; he was neo-classical among classics too. He made connoisseurs purr with his enticing flight and devilish drop; off his marvellously dexterous digits, the ball side-spun and over-spun. He entrapped batsmen with both the simplest and complex set-ups. He evoked the envy of new-age spin tyros with his practised knack of flicking the ball with the index finger, in his expertise to use different grips. He bowled seam-up with as much dexterity as he deployed the square seam.
No bowler possessed as many variations as Ashwin did since the departure of Shane Warne. On that scale, he was one of the game’s originals, an irreproducible act.
He was the perfect Indian spinner, assembled with a fearful symmetry. He blended the grace of Bishan Singh Bedi with the guile of Erapalli Prasanna, the brain and heart of Anil Kumble and the chutzpah of Harbhajan. That he batted better than all of them and could barge into a team as an all-rounder was a dimension that the colossal shadow of his feats with the ball would overshadow.
Facing Ashwin was akin to entering a larinth. There were variations within variations, snares within snares, subtleties within subtleties. Like Glenn McGrath, he often foxed the best batsmen of the visiting side. He consumed Joe Root seven times, Steve Smith eight and Kane Williamson on five instances. Left-handed virtuosos invoked the devil in him. Among his most prolific victims were Ben Stokes (12), David Warner (11), Alastair Cook (9) and Kumar Sangakkara four times in the space of 23 balls in the Sri Lankan’s farewell series.
There was a ubiquity about the dismissals—bowling from around the stumps, drifting inwards, landing suddenly and deviously, a few metres behind the batsman’s presumptions, the kiss of the edge, the snap of the stumps. A heavy dose of them would comprise any highlight reel tribute.
But Ashwin’s duels with right-handers were equally legendary. Two dismissals illustrate his command over his craft. One was Williamson in Kanpur in 2016, a ripping off- break from a good length area after a two-over tease of lengths. Another was the straighter one that nailed Smith in Adelaide in 2020, one that was plotted months in advance with video analyst Prasanna Agoram and polished to perfection in the intervening months.
Method before magic
He rigorously studied batmen and dissected their flaws and strengths. Minute observations like Sangakkara doesn’t get LBW to off-spinners or that Smith is more vulnerable outside the off-stump than on his pads, despite the massive shuffle. He once explained his thought patterns to this paper: “My preparation is whether I can durb the tempo of a batter. Whether Smith would go to off-stump after 10 balls or 12 balls. Or Joe Root, when you go round the stumps in the first eight balls, he would reverse you once. There are two ways of skinning it, do I want to stop Joe Root from reversing or do I want Root to reverse or get him out?”
The deconstruction of a batsman doesn’t end here. “That will depend on where Root is in his career, how confident he is. Has he got a hundred in the first two Tests? Is he in confident space, is he coming from Sri Lanka after making mountains of runs? So I will try and make a plan because I want that early blood,” he explains.
Some misconstrued this as overthinking. But Ashwin stuck to his essence. “I come from a school where even before a particular method is broken, I want to make sure I stitch it up and don’t get to a point where it’s broken. Why is it happening? That’s the question that people fail to recognise. I am addressing something before they believe I should address it,” he detailed.
He constantly fiddled with his action, experimenting with release points, grips and seam position. He picked new tricks from spinners far younger, he kept his senses open to the game’s ceaseless evolution. He was content with his body of work, but kept the windows of perception open to add new dimensions.
It was as though bowling spin was a spiritual, timeless quest. When he ambled in off his four-step stroll of a run-up, the arms whirling, the face a portrait of calm focus, he did not seem so much his country’s greatest ever match-winner with the red ball as a philosopher in a pursuit of the deepest meaning and purpose of his vocation.

The journey produced exemplary moments, triumphs and victories. He is India’s second-highest wicket-taker in Tests, hauled the most player of the series awards in Tests, and collected the second-most five-wicket hauls in an innings after Muralitharan. The average (24) and strike rate (50) are the finest any Indian spinner of any era, making him an immortal in Indian cricket. But his biggest legacy is that he got the soul back in off-spin bowling, at a time when it was mired in suspect actions and mystery-fixation, making it a riveting spectacle again. In the journey, he just happened to pick wickets.

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