Ravichandran Ashwin always works on his bowling, devising new methods to cripple the batters. An underwhelming tour of Bangladesh has worked wonders for the off-spinner as he decided to give the ball more air in pursuit of getting purchase from the wicket.

“You can go to bed feeling a lot better instead of having just three wickets in your kitty,” Ashwin said after the end of second day’s play in the series-deciding fourth Test. “It does feel good as you end up with a good bag of wickets... I will go to bed tonight a bit early and a bit happier.”

Ashwin has taken 24 wickets in the series so far with an innings left to bowl, but his 6/91 in 47.2 overs will certainly go down as one of his best efforts on a flat deck.

“We expected the wicket to play well but not as slow as it did. So let’s hope that it gets tougher to bat on as the game goes on,” he said.

Asked what worked for him on the second day, when he got five wickets for 34 runs, he remarked: “No one spell is better than the other. And I felt at various stages in this series, be it in Delhi, the number probably don’t give you a five or six but the ball is coming out beautifully,” he said.

“The change of load-up, cocking my action have made my spells a lot more penetrative than Bangladesh… (The change in load-up) was to try to get the batsmen to miss the pace of it, or the trajectory of it. Whenever I bowl with that action trajectory is different, you tend to go back to the ball that is a bit fuller. That’s what (Usman) Khawaja did all through the game. That was the idea of it. I wanted to see if I can get a bit more purchase off the wicket...

“However smaller changes that I have made has ensured that I have got enough purchase off the pitches, and it’s done more in the air than what it did in Bangladesh.

“It wasn’t a pitch where a lot was going for me so I had to use the scrambled seam, the drift and whatever was available, I would take it with both hands,” he said.

Written with PTI inputs