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Ashwin took over 500 wickets and scored over 3500 Test runs — but that doesn’t even scratch the surface of what he meant to India.
R Ashwin announced his retirement from international cricket on December 18. (Picture Credit: AP)
There are a lot of players in the Indian Test team currently playing at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) who have been left rather lonely by Ravichandran Ashwin’s Test retirement last week.
The most obvious one is Ravindra Jadeja, who no longer has an ‘on-field mentor’, someone to bounce off ideas, someone to take off the wicket-taking pressure from him in the first innings of Tests. Ashwin, a true campaigner of bhaad mein gaya pitch, conceded over two runs less per wicket and struck at 5 points quicker than his spin-twin on fresher pitches.
But there’s also Virat Kohli, whose shoulder barge with Sam Konstas was wrong, but saw him left alone to deal with the over-exaggerated reactions that followed from the Australian media. He had no one to step in front of him, rile up the senior Australian players, or take the initiative to speak to the press and publically back his teammate.
There’s Rohit Sharma, who’s struggling with on-field captaincy and his batting. But he has no one to explain to the world that he’s still an excellent off-field leader and a big brother to all the youngsters, that he’s an imperfect human, afterall.
There are the youngsters, too. Shubman Gill, Yashasvi Jaiswal, and maybe, even Rishabh Pant. They don’t have anyone in the system to shield them from being judged purely on numbers — there’s no empathetic voice to stand up and say that Pant is ‘stronger than you think’, or ask what is wrong with what Jaiswal is doing, or reveal that Gill improves every day on his journey.
Perhaps Ashwin was empathetic because no one was that to him. He writes beautifully in his book, I Have The Streets, how, early in his career, he was pulled down by people who over-exaggerated his fitness issues and under-estimated his fielding ability, without understanding the limitations of his illness-prone body or offering any genuine solutions.
He’s perhaps the hardest cricketer to tribute with numbers — 537 Test wickets, 3503 runs, 37 five-wicket hauls, six Test centuries, mean nothing when you speak about Ashwin. Because, for someone most strongly considered a pragmatic scientist, a geek, and someone who bettered emotional thinking with sheer planning, Ashwin was the most humane international cricketer.
In an era where there’s a strong attempt to make press conferences boring, as laconically as possible, and box cricketers into five statements, he ran a YouTube channel and spoke his heart. Sometimes live. No number can determine the impact he had on the millions who learned and felt closer to the game because he spoke.
He replied to people on Twitter. It’s the first thing PR managers ask you to not do. But he was hell-bent to tell them that he was just a cricketer, who didn’t make it on talent, or gift, or luck, or influence. He didn’t demand to be liked by them, he still was.
There are so many moments that’d also make Jasprit Bumrah miss perhaps the only guy who could match him in doing anything and everything to get the wicket. That Hashim Amla ball. That non-striker run-out of Jos Buttler. That Steve Smith wicket in Adelaide. That spell to Shane Watson. When pundits, current head coach Gautam Gambhir included, were asking him to be more orthodox in Tests, he was bowling balls that made it irresistible for commentators to not compare him to Shane Warne.
A master of dip and drift, and of their execution together to get wickets even without turn, it’s hard to tell how much Ashwin relied on sheer data and analysis. But everything he did, on a daily basis, sat well with whatever data was supposed to suggest, to the T. Some would consider T20 his weakest format, but he understood it better and quicker than most around him.
“T20 is where wickets happen,” Ashwin said during this IPL. “Wicket-taking is a little over-rated. You can’t bowl in a wicket-taking way. There are certain phases when you can do wicket-taking. For example, if you’ve taken a wicket, you can go searching for a wicket off the next ball. With the new ball, when Trent Boult bowls, or Mitchell Starc bowls, there’s a window to swing the ball. The first two-three overs. And if it doesn’t swing, you’re pretty much looking for wicket-happening – how do I make the batsman uncomfortable?”
He won India the Champions Trophy. He subtly won India the World Cup. He won countless T20 titles. One of the walls on his home probably seems sponsored by Paytm with how many Test accolades he won. Calling him India’s greatest Test match-winner seems like scratching the surface.
Like Bumrah, he was an outlier, a mind that would have exploded if not expressed through cricket. Like Bumrah, it was personal to Ashwin that India won at any cost.
“I made myself a promise in 2012,” he said in his dressing room speech post-retirement. “We lost the series against England, a tricky one. It was very early in my career and I was just telling myself, we’re not going to lose another one ever, and that’s what I promised myself.”
And he won the 12-year streak while thrilling like Pant, charging you up like Kohli, making you aww like Mohammed Siraj, sometimes everything in the same Test, sometimes everything on the same ball. He didn’t retire alone, but with parts he connected with others — a leader who never was.
There were comparisons. But he averaged better than Nathan Lyon in the Tests they played together in Australia and blew him out of the water in India. It is often forgotten that Jadeja never trumped Ashwin in overseas skills, the lack of trust in Indian pacers’ batting ability — the luxury readily available to Australia — did.
India miss him at the MCG — where, by the way, he is India’s third-highest Test wicket-taker — how could you not? It wasn’t just 500 wickets and 3500 runs that retired. It was a warp in the fabric of Indian men’s cricket, as it’s known, loved and hated. It’ll take many spins over many years to strengthen it as much as Ashwin did.
It’ll take many men, some to fight for the right, some to stand in storms, some to love the game more than everyone else around, some to hit centuries against the West Indies, some to read books, some to make notes, some to ride through Chennai’s streets, and then some more to tell the myriad stories to make India not miss Ashwin. And India still will.
