Wrist watch: Chahal-Yadav over Ashwin-Jadeja
Rohit Mahajan
Tribune News Service
Chandigarh, December 24
On Saturday, right after announcing the Indian ODI team for the tour of South Africa, chief selector MSK Prasad said senior spinners Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja still have a chance to come back into the ODI squad. Prasad has been saying this for quite a while, and Ashwin and Jadeja have been out of the team for quite a while.
Since January 1, 2016, India have played 42 ODIs, and Ashwin has been excluded from 31 of them. He’s played in 11 ODIs in this duration and picked up 10 wickets, for a fairly high average of 55.8.
Jadeja has played four matches more than Ashwin in this time-frame, picking up 11 wickets in 15 ODIs, for an even higher average, 67.09.
Combined, it adds up to 21 wickets for the two of them for an average of 61.71. These are not the numbers that the team or the selectors would expect from their top two spinners. No wonder they’ve not been in India’s scheme of things in the limited-overs cricket.
Wrist-spinners
India have been increasingly relying on their two wrist-spinners, Yuzvendra Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav, for their spin needs. The two haven’t disappointed. Chinaman bowler Yadav has played 14 ODIs since his debut in June this year, and taken 22 wickets at an average of 24.77. Chahal made his debut in June 2016 and has taken 27 wickets from 17 ODIs, average 25.07. Prasad said yesterday that he wants to give a longer run to the younger spinners who’re doing well — Chahal, Yadav and left-arm spinner Axar Patel. “With every game they have been improving a lot. They should be given an extended run since they are doing very well. It is a unanimous decision,” Prasad said. “When we picked these three boys, we wanted to increase the bench strength in the spin department. Today, we have five-six quality spinners aiming for these slots.”
Predictable
The plain vanilla finger spinner is in the danger of becoming extinct — a regular off-spinner bowls most of his deliveries that come in to the right-handed batsman, and it’s easy for the batsman to simply hit the ball to the leg-side with the natural swing of the bat. Robust bats and T20’s turbo-powered aggression have created fearsome batsmen who easily clear the boundary on the leg-side. With a crackdown on chucking, the off-spinner’s weapon of doosra has become less common. The wrist-spinner has a totally legitimate and effective option of deceiving an attacking batsman, the googly. Reports have emerged that Ashwin is trying to master leg-spin bowling — he seems to have come around to the realisation that he’d need to take the wrist-spin route back to the Indian ODI team.
Ashwin is famously brainy, which he himself tends to remind others about; he must have given a great deal of thought to the matter before trying to work on leg-spin bowling, and thus must be aware of the dangers of excessive experimentation.
If he manages to master this wonderful art, it would be a massive achievement which could also get him back in the Indian team. In these times of bowlers under attack, they always need to try to do more and more.
Ash-Jad vs Yad-Yuz
Since Jan 1, 2016, R Ashwin and R Jadeja have played a few ODIs, in which they’ve not done very well:
