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Kuldeep restores faith in the magic of wrist spin
Kuldeep Yadav's stellar Asia Cup performance highlights the decline of wrist spin in cricket, overshadowed by modern analytics favoring predictability.
Amidst the joy of India’s ninth title win in the Asia Cup and the exhilaration of watching young Abhishek Sharma and Tilak Verma’s fearless batting, a glaring contradiction seems to have escaped notice. The highest wicket-taker of the tournament was a man who, just a month ago, was left warming the bench through the five-Test series against England.
In the UAE, Kuldeep Yadav took 17 wickets at an average of 9.29 in a format where batsmen are incentivised to throw their bat at everything. To put this in perspective, the next best was Shaheen Shah Afridi with 10 victims at an average of 16.40.
Despite such a performance, Kuldeep isn’t a certainty for the Indian Test team when the next series comes up. This confirms the sad reality that wrist spin is a dying art. Not one of the top teams in international cricket has much use for a wrist spinner anymore.
Which is a tragedy because wrist spinners are the true magicians of the game. If fast bowlers can make the ball spit and seamers make it talk, a wrist spinner makes it giggle. That comes with all its attendant associations of mischief and irrationality and insouciance.
Take Bhagwat Chandrashekhar, one of only two bowlers -- the other being Jeff Thomson -- who Vivian Richards said had troubled him throughout his career. It was said of the great left-arm spinner Bishan Singh Bedi that he could pitch the ball on a coin on the pitch six times out of six. Chandra, on the other hand, would have missed the coin all six times. That’s because deceit, not accuracy, was his forte. Erratic and dangerous, he was considered a freak who could deliver five mediocre deliveries in an over, only to end it with one that was virtually unplayable. His captain Ajit Wadekar said Chandra had hypnotised batsmen during India’s memorable 1971 tour of England, when he bowled the team to a first-ever series win there with a spell of 6/38 at the Oval.
But watching Chandra bowl with his polio-stricken arm wasn’t the best tutorial in the art of leg spin. Indeed, few Indian bowlers have imitated his action. Anil Kumble, India’s highest wicket-taker and an exponent of the art, was a picture of precision, though calling him a leg-spinner is like calling a mathematician a poet because they both use symbols. Chandra’s true spiritual heir was Abdul Qadir, the wizard from Pakistan who shared much of the former’s quirkiness as well as his unpredictability.
But the 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of fast bowlers, and wrist spin was often considered a dying art even then. With the West Indian pace battery showing the way, there didn’t seem any room for the wiles of wrist spinners. Why bamboozle batsmen when you could simply terrify them?
Enter the emperor of clowns, Shane Warne, the Australian legend who passed away tragically in 2022. Echoing Mozart, he could well have said, “I am a funny man, but my bowling isn’t funny.” That’s because he had something in his armoury that most leg-spinners don’t, control and consistency. His success and his charisma made leg spin sexy again.
Suddenly, kids wanted to bowl like Warne. But lacking his discipline, and his artistry, most failed. That’s because beneath its apparent ease, leg spin is a difficult craft to master. Leg-spinners may seem like circus clowns, all arms and legs and improbable angles. But the greatest purveyors of the art, a list that includes Bill O’Reilly, Mushtaq Ahmed and Rashid Khan, besides Warne, Kumble and Qadir, approached their craft like jazz musicians, improvising madly within a loose framework.
Which brings us back to Kuldeep and the modern game. In an era of data analytics and match-ups and risk percentages, wrist spin has become too unpredictable, too risky. Captains want bowlers who can execute plans A through Z with minimal variation. They want certainty in an uncertain game.
But cricket without wrist spinners is infinitely less thrilling. After all, in a world increasingly obsessed with certainty and control, don’t we all need a little more mischief?
