5 minute read
R Ashwin has exited Test cricket in idiosyncratic style and with a bunch of weird quotes. It’s a fitting departure really for a quirky sort of fella who has done as much as anyone to shape Test cricket over the last decade.
Ashwin has taken the Graeme Swann route of retiring halfway through a tour of Australia – albeit India haven’t lost the series, so in his case he’s exited a live contest.
Like Swann, he’s always been a man who’s spoken his own way as well. His comments on retirement aren’t classics, but you still got that sense of a man who wasn’t steered by the system around him.
“I must say I have created a lot of memories alongside Rohit and several of my other team-mates – even though I have lost some of them over the last few years. We’re the last bunch of OGs – if we can say that – left out in the dressing room, and I will be marking this as my date of having played at this level.”
That’s just an all-round peculiar series of sentences and we absolutely encourage that. Some of it’s down to a bit of clumsy English (Have you lost team-mates or memories?) and the last sentence reads like a phrase that fundamentally doesn’t translate from his native Tamil. At the same time, it’s all shot-through with original thought.
It reminds us a little of one of our favourite colourful-yet-baffling Ashwin quotes, about his lifestyle when he was younger.
“When I was playing first-class cricket, sometimes I used to go to sleep at 11.30 in the night. And wake up at 6.30. Not exactly have my box of nuts. Not exactly drink my water.”
That comes across as such a powerful salvo of rhetoric, while also being almost entirely incomprehensible. We love it.
The thinker
As much as any other cricketer in recent times, Ashwin has always come across as a man who has approached cricket with an open mind, looking for new ways of doing things and coming up with his own ways of solving problems.
He once described warm-up games as “a great laboratory” and described how he’d run experiments in them, bowling more side-on or more front-on; trying different wrist positions and different seam positions.
As he garbled away about the amount of finger-split he thought it was best to use, or the degree of addititional coiling or uncoiling, you concluded two things:
- You had no idea what he was on about
- This man had ideas and he wasn’t afraid to try a few things
Some cricketers are factory-produced. They might have the odd distinctive blemish that helps you distinguish them from their production line siblings, but they’re fundamentally a predictable thing. You set them off into the world of cricket and you kind of already know where they’re going to go.
R Ashwin made his own decisions and took his own unpredictable path. He went down a few dead-ends, but there was often a freshness about his duels with batters, where you got to see the branches of a head-to-head tussle grow before your eyes.
The destroyer
Forget the wicket total. Forget the bowling average. Forget the fact he finished 1.75 runs in credit for batting v bowling – far superior to the vast majority who ply their trade with the ‘all-rounder’ label affixed to them.
The real stat that sums up R Ashwin’s impact on the game is the number of Test five-fors he took. He registered 37 – second only to Muttiah Muralitharan with a scarcely comprehensible 67. (Just the 22 10-wicket matches for Murali. Man, that guy could bowl.)
Ashwin took India from being a somewhat middling Test team to one that was so helplessly incapable of doing anything other than utterly steamrollering opponents at home that they were free to direct almost all of their effort towards finding ways to win overseas.
For 10 years touring Test teams arrived in India expecting to have to combat Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja on pitches that would more than likely turn a bit. Despite the complete transparency and predictability of that challenge, no-one ever really worked it out. When New Zealand came over and won 3-0 earlier this year, he blamed himself.
At the same time, Ashwin’s partnership with Ravindra Jadeja was also one of the great tragedies of our age. As fun as the other guy is, the fact that he could bat and field better than Ashwin, and bowl just as reliably, repeatedly denied us the chance to see our man in conditions that didn’t massively suit him.
The weight of Ashwin’s impact came from his 383 wickets at 21.57 at home, but his 154 wickets at 30.05 overseas – delivered in fits and starts and unhelpful one-off cameo appearances – will forever remain a source of frustration. We would have loved to have had more chances to watch him work it out.
The weirdo
Because if nothing else, Ashwin have gone about things his own way.
We know this because he made a series of online videos with Grandmaster RB Ramesh titled “Learn the Basics of Chess”.
We know it because he went to Devon.
We know it because of everything we’ve already written.
R Ashwin is a man who finds his own way and right now he’s finding his way home, no longer a Test cricketer. Not that this will entirely be the end of his relationship with the format.
Because as he once said himself: “Tomorrow if I am not playing or if I quit or someone kicks me out, I will still watch the game. Because I love it.”
R Ashwin.
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