“The desire to excel has not changed. The desire to keep evolving has not changed.”
A little over two hours after gatecrashing into the elite 500-wicket club in Test cricket, Ravichandran Ashwin sounded out a loud warning to batters across the world. It’s not mission accomplished, yet; 500 is a step in the as-yet unfinished journey, not an end in itself.
There is much to admire about the seasoned off-spinner who has braved the vicissitudes that confront every professional sportsperson and come out the better for it. Having operated in the giant shadow of Harbhajan Singh at the start of his career to finding himself relegated to the second-choice spinner for the last five years or so when India have played outside the subcontinent, Ashwin has viewed every adversity as a springboard to success. He hasn’t spent as much time moping and self-pitying as he has at the drawing board, using every setback as an opportunity to improve his craft, every cocked snook as a chance to learn so long as he kept an open mind.
Cold facts will confirm that Ashwin is the second fastest to reach the 500-wicket landmark, behind only the legendary Muttiah Muralitharan in terms of both Tests and innings. That itself is a massive accomplishment for someone who has often been held up for his lack of success in the so-called SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) countries.
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In so many ways, it’s a very Indian thing to pick holes in their own heroes’ accomplishments, to carp and nitpick when the easier, more obvious option is to celebrate greatness. And make no mistake, Ashwin is in the club of the greats. Only eight bowlers previously have topped 500 scalps in Tests; to enter that rarified space has required Ashwin to plug away relentlessly for hours on end, a task he has performed uncomplainingly while ensuring that he is constantly in the quest for sustained excellence, that he doesn’t get left behind while resting on his laurels and basking in already achieved glory.
Ashwin is an experimenter par excellence, and that’s entirely by choice – by his choice, lest there be any confusion. That’s largely because he is driven by becoming a better version of himself each time he picks up the ball, not so much because he is obsessed with the numbers game that the rest of the world around him seems fascinated by. To many, he is an overthinker, someone who complicates a simple game, but as Ashwin once told this writer, if a scientist is not criticised for thinking science 24×7, why must it be any different if a cricketer thinks cricket all the time or if a bowler thinks bowling every waking minute?
Ashwin’s road nothing short of magical
It’s hard to argue with that logic when it emanates from someone who boasts 728 international wickets (and counting). And to think that, like his other Indian compatriot in Club 500, he didn’t aspire to be an out-and-out spinner when he started off.
Anil Kumble began his cricketing career bowling medium pace until a quirk in his action, pointed out in his early teens by an eagle-eyed umpire in a local game in Bengaluru, forced him to switch to leg-spin. Kumble, of course, bowed out as India’s greatest match-winner, with 619 wickets, and is one of only three bowlers to have picked up all ten wickets in a Test innings.
Ashwin was a top-order batter till his mid-teens, playing for the India Under-17 team as an opener – interestingly, he was dropped to accommodate Rohit Sharma – before he played a club game in Chennai where the opposition was 220-odd without loss chasing a little over 300 for victory. In desperation, his captain tossed him the ball and the unheralded off-spinner feasted on the left-handers on his way to a six-wicket haul that earned his side victory. That, and the fact that there was a spinner’s slot vacant in the Tamil Nadu Ranji Trophy team, drove him to take up off-spin on a serious, full-time basis. From Mahendra Singh Dhoni to Rohit, and from Gary Kirsten to Rahul Dravid, successive team managements are thankful for that shift.
Zak Crawley’s scalp on Friday’s second day of the third Test in Rajkot, caught at short-fine on the sweep, catapulted the 37-year-old to the exclusive band of 500-men. It was only a matter of time before he got there, but the long wait between Nos. 499 and 500 – 78 deliveries, long for Ashwin, not mere mortals – must have been frustrating. Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to write a whole new script with a Test, indeed the series, in the balance.
