Ravi Ashwin for President!

4 man of the series awards in 28 Tests, an exemplary bowling strike rate of 61 and an average of 32, fastest Indian to get to 100 wickets... and they go on. The numbers will tell their story. They always do. But what excites me the most from this extra ordinary bowler is the fact that he has tried innumerable things to get better every day, failed more often than not but never stopped learning. Having followed his entire career quite closely, I have seen Ashwin go through soaring highs and a few really ordinary phases. I have seen him bowl 6 variations in an over only to get smacked all over the ground. I have seen him dismiss the likes of Gayle, McCullum with attacking spin bowling with the new ball. I have seen him tossing it up to entice the batsman, or at times fire in too many darts. I have seen him doing it all, trying too hard to bring out the extra ordinary. It has worked a few times but fired right back in his face on most. The best thing of it all was, he never repeated his mistakes. You talk about virtues like temperament and character, and in Ashwin you get the entire package.

If you haven't yet, you should listen to Ashwin talk about his game, his preparations. There aren't many out there who read the game as well as he does. He spoke in the presentation ceremony after the 3rd test in Colombo about looking to put more body into the ball here on Sri Lankan wickets which tend to be quite slow. He also mentioned that he picked that up right after the 3-day practice game India played right before the before the first test. I thought that little adjustment he tried to make was top notch. He also hailed Sanjay Manjrekar's article on Cricinfo which helped him sort out a technical flaw after the Sydney test earlier this year. You listen to Ashwin talk about such things, and only wish if every Cricketer out there did these things. Watch this and I won't be surprised if you fall in love with him. But having said all that, the thing that has helped him the most is the fact that he has started to find peace with his stock delivery - the off spinner. It is a difficult thing to do that, mind you, especially when you have so many variations in your armory. He bowls the arm ball just as good as anyone and also has that trademark Ashwin carrom ball. However, the thing with stock deliveries is they are effective for a reason. That's why you have specialist "off spinners" or "leg spinners" and not someone who can bowl everything. It is not rocket science to be able to bowl all kinds of spin, but then had it been effective, people would have done that way too earlier and we wouldn't have specialist bowlers of a type.

What the stock delivery does is, it helps in setting batsmen up. Now here's the catch, you set batsmen up for the element of surprise - the variation. This variation need not be a complete variation in the type of the delivery i.e. you don't completely have to bowl the ball that (say) spins the other way. The variation could be in pace, in length, in flight or, more effectively, in the usage of the crease. When you bowl 8 balls from close to the stumps and suddenly bowl the 9th one slightly away in the crease, it creates a completely different angle and the batsman has to pick that up quickly to survive. Especially when there is not much on offer from the pitch, it is subtle variations like these which enforce the error. And, I think Ashwin is using that to a great effect. Also I believe he has worked quite a lot in developing 2 off spinners. One is his usual off spinner which comes quite naturally and effortlessly to him, but off late he has developed this new one which has a bit more bite in it. He gives the ball more rip by using his body a lot more and also tossing it up a little, thereby allowing more revolutions on the ball. On pitches where there isn't much bounce, the effort off spinner proves to be quite lethal. In this latest tour of Sri Lanka, I believe, he bowled the effort off spinner a lot more particularly because of the slow pitches there and the kookaburra ball which doesn't grip after a certain point.

In the video interview that I have shared above, Ashwin also talks about a very valid point about bowling with long sleeves and dirty actions. Apart from Ashwin, the other offies who have been successful lately are Ajmal and Narine. Both bowl with long sleeves and dirty actions and are now paying the price for it. There is of course that 15 degree rule, but then it is very marginal. It is always better to bowl with a clean straight arm action and that 15 degree leverage is for the odd ball where your delivery stride or rhythm messes up a bit and you don't release the ball properly. If you start playing with that 15 degree rule in order to give you more oomph in your bowling, you are constantly flirting with danger and it is just a matter of time when you are going to get suspected for it. I am very glad the ICC has been quite strict about it off late and is bringing the hammer out more often than not. A lot of spinners across the globe have come under scrutiny and it has given quite a few setbacks to teams depending heavily on that spinner. And as Ashwin rightly mentions in the interview, the harsh scrutiny is in turn laying out an even playing field for all spinners and that's how it should be.

When you think about it, that strike rate and that average by an action as clean as his, Ashwin is right up there among the best off spinners of the modern era. Add to that the exceptional attitude, a shrewd mind and a quick learner. What else can you ask for? It is true he struggled in away tours of SA, NZ, Eng and Aus, but then, every spinner does (at least in their first tours to the respective nations). At times, the fields set were slightly iffy or it was just hard luck. But if you look at his performance graph in all these tours, you will get a monotonically increasing curve and that is something he should be proud of. I thought he bowled really well in Australia. There might not have been a big 5 wicket haul but he kept it tight and gave those crucial breakthroughs here and there. In the world cup too, India in general performed quite good as a bowling unit and whenever you saw Ashwin bowl, he kept prodding away at the batsmen. Also, one must not forget the crucial batting depth he gives down the order with his exquisite technique and the ability to take on the bowling when required. Given his attitude and the rate at which he keeps on getting better with each game, I am quite certain he is going to be nothing but legendary for India in the years to come. With his smart ability to read the game, he might even be captaincy material. But we will have to wait for that. Although, I think it is not that bad an idea for him to be made the vice captain. A fitting candidate for that, has decent anount of experience and also a good rapport with Kohli. I'm excited for India's series with South Africa which starts next month. SA has a lot of left handers, Ashwin would be raring to go.

High on life

            The last time I wrote here, I was agitated. I almost lost hope in Indian Cricket. I felt we were up to no good. I ended the post by undermining India's great run in ODIs off late and how because of it, India's Test Cricket debacles go unnoticed. Well, it might be true, it might not be. Today is not a day to talk about that. For today is the day when we could just sit back, ideally with a hot cup of coffee (that is if you can't afford champagne), and marvel at how India has managed to put together an ODI side that is EXCELLENT in every single facet of the game.

Now, as every other individual my Cricketing experience is limited to my particular era or generation. I don't know the Indian teams of the 80s which won the World Cup and the Benson and Hedges World Championship as well as I know the Indian teams of the last 10 years. In my 12 years of following Cricket like a nerd, I haven't seen an Indian ODI team, so clinical in every aspect of the game. I have seen the Australian teams of 2003-2008 being like that, I have seen the South African teams being like that far more consistently too and it is an incredibly proud moment as an Indian to have a team with not even an infinitesimal chance of criticism. You could say I'm sounding like every other cliched commentator out there, but the fact is I'm not trying to be an exception. I'm not trying to stimulate a different contradictory point of view on this Indian side, because frankly there just isn't one. There's no denying the fact that each individual in this team has lifted himself to to a whole new level at this big stage of the ICC Cricket World Cup. The batting and spin-bowling, which historically have been India's key strengths in the game have retained their likewise reputation, but it is the fielding and the fast bowling which has been absolutely jaw-dropping.

We did win the World Cup back in 2011, with a side as good as any at the time. We did have a clinical batting order, but yet the bowling wasn't this fiery then and we did carry a couple of donkeys in the field. Sachin was on his last legs, Sehwag wasn't the most agile outfielder in the world. Munaf and Nehra were slow, and Zaheer had skills other than those of quality fielding. We did have smaller grounds in India unlike here in Australia which helped us to some extent. The out fielders didn't have to make a lot of ground to prevent a boundary or restrict the threes to twos and so on. But, it was always clear that the same fielding unit would be found wanting the moment Cricket was played on bigger grounds and juicier pitches. When it came to fast bowling, we were incredibly lucky I feel to have Zaheer peak at the right time. If you look at his record on either side of that particular World Cup, it wasn't exemplary. There was always an injury somewhere around the corner or a patch of predictive bowling which usually was just enough to take a 1-50 and make him retain his place in the side. The other pacers we had were Munaf, Nehra and Sreesanth. Munaf was pretty handy in the middle overs, but you always knew he could be effective only on the slow drop-in pitches by taking the pace off the ball and bowling wicket to wicket. Sreesanth had pace but was wavered. Nehra was injury prone, and certainly not at his 2003 best. All in all, you could say we had a fast bowling unit just decent enough for the team to be able to make-do especially and probably only in the conditions the subcontinent had to offer. The death bowling was still a worry, even in the finals SL belted us for more than 100 runs in the last 10 overs. This, mind you, was with the old Cricketing rules of being able to have 5 fielders on the fence in the non-powerplay overs. We did win the World Cup then, but saying we had a world class balanced unit was a bit of an overstatement.

Now let's rewind a bit more, shall we? Let's go down to early 2008 when we won the ODI tri-series in Australia featuring Sri Lanka as the third team. This was well, the very beginning of India's rebuilding phase. Dhoni was pretty new to the captaincy role, we had left out Dravid and Ganguly from the ODI squad too. The Rohit Sharmas, the Praveen Kumars, the Ishant Sharmas were slowly being exposed to this beast of international Cricket. We did have a pretty settled unit then. The fast bowling looked fresh and filled with vigour, for we had a bowler who could bowl 140. Tendulkar was in the form of his life, we were still considering Irfan Pathan to be that fast bowling all rounder we have always wanted. However, we didn't have the most settled middle order then. Yuvraj was struggling big time. Dhoni hadn't yet become the finisher that he is. There was no Raina and you couldn't depend on Irfan at No. 7. If you look at the Indian team now, every single member of the squad knows specifically what his role is in the side. And, these players are matured enough to alter their roles depending on the situation. Today if India were suddenly 30-3 with Dhawan, Kohli and Rahane in the hut, you could expect a Rohit Sharma and a Suresh Raina to build an innings from scratch. However, if India were 30-3 back then with Tendulkar, Gambhir and Sehwag back in the hut, stabilizing the innings was too much to ask of the then out-of-form Yuvraj and the then inexperienced Rohit Sharma. Yes, the fielding wasn't all that bad and neither was the bowling, but the batting screamed inexperience after the top 3 were gone.

We could rewind back and forth again, only to find a team much weaker than what we have now. We could very well go back to 2003 when we made the finals of the World Cup in South Africa, the bowling clicked but the fielding still well below than most of the international teams at the time. We could fast forward to the one which won the Champions trophy in 2013, a pretty decent batting and a fielding unit. But death bowling was a major worry. It took a real stroke of luck in the finals too to get over the line. The point I'm trying to make is we have never had a side that has ticked all the boxes like the way we are doing now. And, we ought to be mighty proud with that. A lot of credit for this has to go to the support staff. We have been critical of Duncan Fletcher, but it appears that he was in it for the long haul and was laying a pretty solid foundation. Sanjay Bangar, Bharat Arun and Sreedhar too seem to have added great value to the side, making the boys go through the motions pretty comfortably. And, you just simply cannot shy away from giving Ravi Shastri the credit he deserves. A very astute thinker of the game, I have no doubts in my mind that Shastri must have had a phenomenal hand in shaping Indian Cricket the way it has in the last 6 months.

  But then again, I might just be a bit too high on life. Why would't I be?! Rohit Sharma has finally played a matured knock and WE HAVE TAKEN 70 WICKETS IN 7 GAMES! There's still a tough semi-final to be won. But, I don't think we are going down without a fight like the way we did at the Oval just before my last post on this crappy blog.