What Comes Next after Ashwin and Lyon?

Kolkata: Trends in cricket can be cyclical, and it seems like the current trend is hitting an unknown low. In the past, we had the likes of Muttiah Muralitharan, Harbhajan Singh, Saeed Ajmal, and Graeme Swann dominating with their off-spin bowling skills on various surfaces. Now, we have Nathan Lyon and Ravichandran Ashwin leading the pack as the two highest wicket-takers. But who will step up to continue the legacy after them?

Exaggerated it might seem but the insinuation that off-spinners are a dying breed is a logical deduction from the numbers thrown up in this column in the last few years. Shoaib Bashir is the newest entrant to this tribe but since 2011 — when Ashwin and Lyon made their Test debuts — only eight other off-spinners have made their debuts and made it to the 50-wicket mark. Which is not great to begin with, even more so if you take out Moeen Ali, Dilruwan Perera, Ramesh Mendis, Roston Chase, Shane Shillingford and New Zealand’s Mark Craig who have not played a Test of late. And then there is Joe Root who isn’t exactly a specialist.

Which leaves Bangladesh’s Mehidy Hasan Miraz, still 26, on 164 wickets, as the only currently active off-spinner who can dream of coming within touching distance of Ashwin and Lyon. This is Bangladesh cricket though, with a long legacy of left-arm spinners, and not a great history of rational selection. Now pit this sorry state of off-spinners against slow left-arm bowlers and the gap becomes remarkable. Since 2011, 12 left-arm bowlers — including India’s Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav — have made their debuts and reached at least 50 Test wickets. Of them, nine of them are still active, 10 if you add Shakib Al Hasan who had made his debut in 2007.

These are telling numbers, and not the right sort for anyone rooting for off spinners. Which is a crying shame because off-spin bowling has always worked in Test cricket where the bowler doesn’t have to think about protecting boundaries with an extra fielder out. To that precision art of pitching the ball at the right length, Saqlain Mushtaq had added the doosra, Muralitharan more wrist and Ashwin the carrom ball. And even though the ICC-mandated 15-degree elbow flex was allegedly breached on the odd occasion, the results were nonetheless scintillating.

So where did off-spin lose ground? A major reason has been that the stock ball of the off-spinners turns into the right-hand batters, who tend to dominate batting line-ups around the world. Left-arm bowling gives a bigger range from that perspective, more so for a left-arm wrist spinner like Kuldeep who can turn the ball in and away from the right-hander from the same action. With the preponderance of right-handed batters, it was only a matter of time before data matchups started highlighting the ‘left-right’ angle in favour of slow left-arm bowlers.

So the brief became very clear within a few years of franchise T20 cricket — either take the ball away from the right-hander or just keep darting it in so that he doesn’t get any bat under it. The latter, especially, requires more control than skill. And it was only a matter of time that template was used in Tests as well. An apt example was the tour of England in 2021, where Virat Kohli kept arguing that Jadeja’s matchup against England’s right-handed batters was one of the reasons behind Ashwin’s continued non-selection.

Not every off-spinner can be an Ashwin or Lyon who can make subtle changes in their trajectory and use of crease or set up the leg-side trap to bounce back with more purchase but there is no doubt that wrist spinners and slow left-arm bowlers have had it better of late due to circumstantial reasons. Individually too, they have gotten better. Spurred by the success of Monty Panesar in England’s landmark Test series win in India in 2012, visiting teams are now expected to lean on slow left-arm bowlers more than ever. Mitchell Santner, Ajaz Patel and Keshav Maharaj thus are classic examples of how some left-arm spinners have had more success in India as opposed to their own countries.

Pertinent, however, is how Indians too have taken a shine to this idea, as evident from the glut of slow left-arm bowlers in franchise and domestic cricket. Axar Patel, once considered a more restrictive bowler, has now found serious footing in Test cricket, all the more so because he bats well like Jadeja. Ashwin bats equally well, but the selection criteria have evolved in such a way that Washington Sundar — the only plausible replacement of Ashwin — is pressed to focus more on his batting than bowling in franchise cricket. That can’t set a great environment for off-spinner aspirants.

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