The beautiful dream of Washington Sundar

Every team in world cricket wants a player who can bat in the top five or six and be a frontline bowler. Teams will abandon all common sense in search of this. It is the third rail or the white whale of international cricket.

The idea is that if you find a player who can do that, you add an extra batter or bowler. That makes your lineup more flexible. The traditional meaning of an allrounder is being able to be picked on both disciplines. But almost no one in the history of the game has managed this consistently.

Yet, the dream remains. Coincidentally, Washington Sundar made 152 against Delhi last week. Today, he added 7/59 against New Zealand.

I think the problem with Washington Sundar as an allrounder has more to do with his batting. He did not make a lot of runs at the start of his domestic career. So, he has been playing catch-up ever since. He has also never had a season where he averaged 150, or even 50 to 70 consistently for a few seasons.

When you're an allrounder, you're competing with someone who is a specialist in that position and has spent years getting to that level before they're about to be picked for their country. However, allrounders don't usually spend as much time on their batting compared to specialists. They have also perhaps moved around in the lineup.

But the reason they are always in this conversation is because of that magic word—potential. If this guy can bat in your top six and bowl, you're getting instant flexibility. So you take a bigger risk on him and see what happens.

He has potential as a spinner, but again, they have plenty of first-choice options who are well ahead of him in the pecking order. I think someone saw that he had developed his bowling to another level. So they took a normal selection chance based on someone looking very good in the nets.

India didn't pick him the way that they have in the past, which is as the fifth bowler. He bowled like someone who should have been in this side as a bowler. That's quite different from other games where he often came on later when not a lot was happening and Ashwin needed a bit of rest.

Now of course, his batting always plays a part. Maybe they wanted to bat all the way down to number nine, although there are diminishing returns anytime you make a batting order go that deep.

As we said before, allrounders have the toughest time to develop. If you look at successful Test allrounders like Imran Khan, Ravindra Jadeja or Daniel Vettori, there were long periods in their career where it took them ages to actually bring up their second skill to the level that it needed to be.

And if you had seen Washington Sundar bowl before—which I have probably more than most people—he was someone who had the talent, but not the hours. He was like a holding bowler, who could be very handy, but didn't really add anything to that. That was not the bowler we saw today. He looked like the real deal.

One thing I really enjoyed about the way he bowled was the way he mixed up his pace. That's a very important quality to have, and it might seem really easy because you see Ashwin and Jadeja do it all the time. Normal spinners don't do it as often, and not in this particular way.

You could see his best ball was very, very quick. But he also had this particular slower ball that he was using for specific batters in certain situations. The ability to change your pace by seven to eight kilometers shows incredible tactical awareness and high-level skill.

He had a very good plan of bowling bail length and straight to Glenn Phillips, essentially tucking him up. Phillips had no width to free his arms and Washington bowled nothing that is overpitched or underpitched. He kept him pinned to the crease.

He did this for quite a while and he would occasionally bowl slower—of course, those are the balls that Phillips went after. He should have been out playing a slog sweep earlier, but eventually he didn't know what to do and he played a terrible shot when long off was about 40 to 50 meters away from him. Phillips was so confused that he did he didn't really swing through. He was tucked up again, and in the end he just unconvincingly hit the ball to long off.

Glenn Phillips, who likes to score and hit, basically couldn't against Washington Sundar. One of the reasons that I was fascinated by this wicket was that it didn't really have all that much to do with the pitch ragging. If anything, he was trying to dart the ball through. This was all intelligence.

However, we do need to talk about Kuldeep Yadav being dropped. He's a fantastic bowler who would probably be the star for almost every other team in the world. India have so many spinners that Axar Patel, who had a bowling average in the negative at one stage, can't get a game for India.

I fundamentally don't understand why Kuldeep was dropped, because in the last Test I didn't see New Zealand picking him particularly well. I don't think he performed brilliantly, but I also don't feel he bowled that poorly on a surface that no spinners bowled well on.

I understand the idea of not being able to drop Ashwin or Jadeja. But that last pitch did not help spinners at all. If Kuldeep had played in this game, he would have found a wicket that was much more his style. If you're a spin bowler, you don't want to accidentally get picked in the first Test, and you definitely want to be picked for this match.

But here's where it gets even more incredible. When Washington Sundar bowled, it actually spun more. Ashwin had done the heavy lifting on what was a flat pitch, but with a little bit of assistance for the turning ball. He had taken all the early wickets and he looked like the best of their bowlers.

After that, Washington and Jadeja were bowling. That's when the ball started to rag. Jadeja didn't take any wickets in this period, and he could have. So clearly, the offspinner still deserves a lot of praise. This pitch was spinning a lot. It was the exact kind of surface that we thought New Zealand batters would struggle on.

In the case of Rachin Ravindra's wicket, it turned six degrees. There had been balls early in the day that had occasionally turned to that extent. The difference is that by the time Washington was bowling later on in the day, it was consistently turning that much.

But the Southee wicket was interesting as well, partly because he made runs in the previous Test, albeit in completely different situations. Washington came around the wicket and was much more interested in bowling straight across to Southee. The New Zealander had absolutely no idea how to handle that.

So the Rachin wicket was a dream ball to a left-hander, and the Southee wicket was all smarts and an arm ball. That's good variation.

But if we're talking about a picture-perfect scenario for an offspinner, it's almost always the same. A right-hander is batting. They are bowling their off spinners and drifting the ball away a little bit. The ball drags the hands of the batters outside the line, and then it rips back and hits the top of middle stump.

That's exactly what happened to Blundell. There is no doubt that was the dream ball. It was absolutely perfect.

The question now is if that is the reality. Was this just a wicket that was helping him and a great day? Or is this what I've always believed as a long-term Washingtonite—that eventually he was just going to mature into this kind of player and become a huge star?

In order for Washington Sundar to shed the beautiful 'potential' tag, we are going to need a lot more dream balls and a lot more dream days.