You own a YouTube channel with 1.61 million subscribers who expect you to talk cricket. But you proudly run a series on it called ‘Learn the Basics of Chess’. Weird? That’s Ravichandran Ashwin for you.
The star off-spinner, who has been India’s biggest match-winner in the last decade or so, ran a series on chess on his YouTube channel in collaboration with Grandmaster RB Ramesh about two years ago. Andhe wasn’t doing it for fun, he was immensely passionate about it. You can make that out easily if you watch itfor a few minutes even ifyou stumble upon thefluent Tamil he uses to address his viewers.
There have been thinking cricketers, a lot of them, people who don’t just float on the surface counting the runs and wickets, they engineer their success with deep thinking, outsmarting the opposition on several levels. To cite a recent example, take the case of Jasprit Bumrah, the premier pacer who outthinks most of the world batters.
But Ashwin is more than that. He does what Bumrah does, but goes beyond as well. Ashwin’s experimentation was not just limited to his tricks with off-spin, he perhaps dissected the whole game in the laboratory of his mind. It seems he has a view of cricket which few others, or none maybe, ever had. A problem-solver par excellence, he’s a bowler who instilled fear not only in the mind of the striker, but also the non-striker. The purists criticise it calling it “Mankading”, but Ashwin flexed his arms within the laws of the game.
Ashwin could have done more such Ashwin things, but the world will perhaps never know much about it. Why? Primarily because we couldn’t see Ashwin captaining in international cricket.
It’s a miss for a cricket romantic, it’s a miss for Indian cricket. Would he have come up with never-seen-before field settings if he was the captain? Would he have challenged the conventional practices if he had the power to do so? For an off-spinner who bowled leg-spin for an entire spell during a domestic match just because he thought the situation demanded so, it’s fascinating to think what more he could have done if presented with a bigger canvas. We will never know, despite the man being pregnant with such a promise for most of his cricketing career.
What stopped Ashwin from becoming a captain? The 38-year-old thinks that the label of being an “over-thinker” that was pasted on him by pundits worked to his disadvantage. It’s unfortunate if that’s true. Yes, he was a thinker, an over-thinker at times too, but isn’t that the need in an age when cricket itself is constantly trying to reinvent its relevance? Twenty20 cricket is the fruit of someone’s ‘over-thinking’ and look what it has done for the game.
After Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Virat Kohli seemed a logical choice to take over the captaincy of contemporary cricket’s biggest team. But after Kohli’s days as a captain were over, the captaincy of the Indian team could have easily been split, because Rohit Sharma, though deserving, was not a convincing choice as an all-format captain. So Rohit could have taken care of the white-ball teams, while Ashwin could been in charge in Tests.
Fact is, Indian cricket never bestowed the superstar status to Ashwin that he deserved. Stats confirm that he has been prolific as a match-winner for the side. Critics may say that he was a ‘home tiger’, preying on the mostly hapless technique of modern-day batters on turning wickets, but has the team shown enough faith in him in overseas conditions even when he was in top form? He wasn’t selected for theWorld Test Championship final at The Oval against Australia last year even though he was the No. 1 bowler in the world then and held an upper hand against Aussies. The team said selectionswere based on conditions and so Ravindra Jadeja, the left-arm spinner and Ashwin’s long-time partner in wicket hunts, was given thenod ahead of the offie.That’s debatable.
To cut a long story short, Ashwin never got his due recognition. Unlike, Rohit and Kohli, Ashwin was always the droppable genius in the team. It’s bewildering why such a treatment was meted out to India’s second-highest Test wicket-taker.
The good thing is Ashwin has promised that he will be “involved with the game” in some way even after his retirement. So we may yet get to see Ashwin in some other role where he can do his things his way. What about Ashwin, the BCCI boss?