R Ashwin: The nerd, artist and ballistic interceptor

R Ashwin left a ball to win a World Cup match. Not any game, but the most watched in cricket, and really almost of all sport, that year. It did not require cricket skill or stunning athleticism. It could have been done by anyone in a park or gully match who was smart and had the courage to do something a bit weird. 

Basically, to do this, you needed to be a cricket nerd in Excelsis. 

This is thinking cricket, but it also has courage. Because if you do this and get it wrong, you look like you’re trying to be too smart. Like you didn’t actually want to do the right thing and just try and hit the winning runs. 

But Ashwin saw the game differently. Many players do. But they stay in line, keep their head down, and follow the game as it was played. 

Ashwin wouldn’t even stay in line enough to bowl on one side of the wicket and stay there. In a Test, he suddenly decided to come around the wicket, but after delivering the ball, he would cross back to over the wicket in front of the umpire.

That would have occurred to other players before him. Especially in the DRS era, where running in front of the umpires was less of an issue. But he took it to the next level. He not only did it in a Test, he then explained to the umpire where the danger area was on the pitch, and how he was running across before it. He was engineering a new format of bowling right in front of our eyes. 

There is thinking different, and there is being different. Ashwin was smart enough to be the first one, and courageous enough to do the second. 

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In 2009, I was in a swimming pool in a resort in Dambulla on holiday. Quite randomly, there were three cricket teams staying there when playing a tri-series: the hosts Sri Lanka, New Zealand and India. My cricket journey was realy early, so none of the players knew who I was. This meant I could kind of hang around and get a feel for both teams, without looking like someone trying to get a scoop or info. 

One day I went down to one of the back pools to do some swimming. A few lengths in and I realised someone else was swimming as well. After a while, I realised they were trying to keep up with me. So I went faster, and this person went with me. Then I really went for it, and again they were trying to catch me. This was not like an Olympic pool; it was basically the one usually for kids, away from the snazzy infinity ones that look good for Instagram at the front. It wasn’t a place you race people. 

But this dude wouldn’t stop. He wasn’t a strong swimmer, his technique was a bit all over the place. But no matter how hard I pushed, he was trying to catch and beat me. Eventually, I stopped, and so did he, and in that pool, as we both frantically tried to catch our breathes I realised this random dude was Ashwin. 

Yes he was a nerd, an intellectual cricket scientist, but he also had that dawg in him. This wasn’t a professor who had theories, this was a guy out there doing fieldwork. 

Remember when Australia bombed him on India’s last tour? His back was so stiff, he looked like he was your grandfather getting off a 12 hour bus trip. Yet, he fought through. Cricket may have come to him as a puzzle to solve, but he also had the fight to take hits and get angry himself. 

The moment when these two sides truly came together was during the runouts at the non-striker's end. He helped change the global perception on these, and he did it with critical thinking, and that dawg in him. 

Like many of us, he couldn’t understand why a batter could get an advantage here, and not be punished. It hurt his brain that there had been an artificial spirit put into what was a simple equation. You walk out of the crease, you can be run out. But he also had that dawg in him to say, 'Nah, fuck it, I’m willing to put my reputation on the line to stand by my belief.'

I want to win this game, and this person is out of the crease. 

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Ashwin did not bowl offspin enough. I know that sounds crazy, but too often he would be so quick to change what he was doing that he forgot he was the best pure offspinner in the world, and probably ever. His brain moved so quickly that after two or three balls he would be trying in to in spin, carrom balls, a new angle, quicker balls, whatever he needed to. It was like he got bored of just being great at offspin. 

Never has a bowler of this level deconstructed their own main skill as much as he did, like when he went to the Asia Cup to bowl in long sleeves and try Sunil Narine’s action. What about the time when he decided in the IPL that he was basically a legspinner?

Most players with an advantage like he had, would just milk it until the wickets stop coming. He would change a few overs into a Test spell because he hadn’t looked like getting a wicket in three balls time. His processing speed was almost too quick, not allowing him to come in with a fast, turning and bouncing offspin delivery that probably would have gotten him a wicket anyway. 

Some of this came from the fact he started as a batter. Because he had a part-timer's brain, like Sobers or Tendulkar, he was always trying new things. But he did it with Bishan Bedi’s fingers. So while great old spinners would show patience, he was already onto his seventh theory in his second spell. 

He was athletically gifted in terms of spin bowling, but not in any other way. He didn’t have fast twitch muscle fibres, or a stereotypical athletic body. But like Andrea Pirlo or Nikola Jokic, his brain was athletic. He was able to recalibrate on the fly with new information, understanding in a second what the opposition were trying to do. Most spinners have that, his was in a constant sixth gear.

But that shouldn’t underestimate his incredible athleticism. He was a skill based athlete, but he had incredible hands that could catch up with his brain. He could spin the ball at pace, change the axis of the ball on a whim, could spin the ball in both directions, master other styles like a great mimic. And none of that would have been possible without those hands. 

He will forever be linked to the spinning wickets era of Indian cricket, where teams turned up to wickets that basically had Ashwin’s face tattooed onto them in the dust. Like Jimmy Anderson, he will be seen as a conditions bully by some. But people forget that he could have been better everywhere else had his career not overlapped with a great allrounder named Ravindra Jadeja. And even if he was only ever great on spinning pitches, a lot of players have bowled on them before. They don’t have his numbers. 

Add to that the fact he is the best bowler to left-handers we have ever seen. At his peak, standing on the goofy side of the bat to him was a death sentence. 

What is his legacy purely as a spinner? Well, he has a pretty good case for being the third-best of all time. That is not bad for a man who seemed bored with his main skill.