By Admin 
Mohammad Azharuddin was an artiste in the truest sense of the word. An absolute entertainer who compelled attention with his mere presence on a cricket field. He glided across the turf effortlessly, seldom putting in a dive because he didn’t need to, arriving at the ball that bit quicker than seemed humanly possible. And he had more time than most to play his strokes because he sighted the ball and summed it up early and played it as late as he could.
Contrary to mischievous innuendo from motivated quarters, he was a pretty good player of fast bowling. Otherwise, how could he have unleashed centuries in Cape Town (against Allan Donald, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener and Brian McMillan), Adelaide (Craig McDermott, Mike Whitney, Merv Hughes) and Faisalabad (Imran Khan, Wasim Akram, Saleem Jaffar)? He was excellent against seam and swing, evidenced by two Test tons apiece in England and New Zealand. But it was against spin that the wristy Hyderabadi was at his magical best.
Quick on his feet, hawk-eyed from the moment the ball left the bowler’s hand till it made sweet contact with his bat and always on the lookout for runs because that was his organic mindset, Azharuddin saw gaps where mere mortals noticed fielders. He thought little of coming down the track, giving himself a little bit of room, to play the off-spinner on a turning track towards the less populated off-side. Likewise, when a left-arm spinner packed the off-side, Azharuddin brought his wonderfully supple wrists into play to target the on-side where there were runs for the taking. It was all against the natural order of things; coaches would baulk at his impunity, opponents would gasp at his mastery, but Azharuddin knew exactly what he was doing. Proof of the pudding? 6,215 runs from 99 Tests, average 45.03, more hundreds (22) than fifties (21).
What Gautam Gambhir wouldn’t give now to have an Azharuddin in his playing XI? A Sachin Tendulkar or a V.V.S. Laxman, a Rahul Dravid, a Virender Sehwag or a Sourav Ganguly, even a Gambhir himself? What wouldn’t he give to have batters unafraid to leave the crease to meet the ball, batters with the proverbial soft hands that keep slips and close-in fielders in front of the stumps at bay, batters forcing bowlers to bowl to their strengths while sacrificing their own?
It’s now official – the days of Indians being considered the best players of spin are well behind us. Maybe that too is in the natural order of things because the only constant in any sphere of life is change. This shift from supreme dominance against slow bowling of any quality, even the highest one — ask Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan, who were driven ragged by the ridiculous comfort with which they were dismantled on helpful tracks in India — to a more hesitant and uncertain approach isn’t sudden or an overnight development. In the last decade or so, India’s batters have had their problems against spin on pitches at home against, with due respect, slightly more than journeymen tweakers. Those problems aren’t going to disappear in a rush, so maybe it’s time to put the myth of India’s felicity against spin to bed and work out other means through which to eke out World Test Championship points in their backyard.
There can’t be any one single contributory factor to the declining dividends against the turning ball. For one thing, India’s cricketers don’t play enough domestic First Class cricket because for the most part, the international calendar doesn’t allow them to. In the last year, a concerted push has been made to compel those not involved in national duty to turn out for their respective States. But by playing an odd match here and another one there, spread over a couple of months, they are not going to get any better against spin, even the decision-makers will agree.
Learning the tricks
The reason why Azharuddin, and then the likes of Dravid and Laxman after them, ended up handling spin with authority and composure isn’t hard to see. Spin was the king in South Zone at the time, when the Ranji Trophy league phase was contested on a zonal basis. In the Karnataka nets, for instance, Dravid would spend hours playing the likes of Anil Kumble, Sunil Joshi, K. Jeshwanth, R. Ananth, sometimes even Raghuram Bhat. In Hyderabad, Laxman was confronted by Venkatapathi Raju, Arshad Ayub and Kanwaljit Singh, spinners of the highest calibre. When they played against Tamil Nadu and even Kerala, which had K.N. Ananthapadmanabhan and B. Ramprakash, they were exposed to top-class spin in a competitive setting. Pitches then, especially in the smaller centres, were not necessarily prepared as well as they should have been, which meant batters had to make further adjustments to produce the runs that would catch the eyes of the national selectors.
By growing up against spin, they had no fear of getting out. This is not to say that they never got out to spin. It’s just that they didn’t second-guess themselves when they left their crease, they didn’t just hang back and try to play the ball off the surface. They watched the bowler’s hand closely, they looked for cues that would tell them a fraction of a second early what the bowler was planning to deliver, so they were already prepared in their mind to play the ball accordingly.
These worthies didn’t stay away from playing for their states whenever the chance presented itself. Stories of the golden generation of Indian cricket, and those before them, such as superstars like Sunil Gavaskar and G.R. Vishwanath, practically getting off the aircraft after an overseas assignment and heading to the ground to represent their state, are legendary and inspirational. Therefore, even as their game against pace improved, they didn’t lose their skills against spin, they didn’t have to dig deep to summon the muscle memory that was once second nature.
The constant grind of competitive cricket, coupled with a marked emphasis on the white-ball formats, has deprived subsequent generations of this luxury. Not many State sides have more than one accomplished spinner, in any case. In their formative years, both in the academies which have swamped the landscape and at the representative age-group levels, slower bowlers are almost discouraged from ‘buying’ wickets, like the Bishan Bedis and the E.A.S. Prasannas once did. Their brief is to keep things tight, to dart the ball at the batters if that’s what prevents the boundaries from flowing. The old-fashioned virtues of loop and dip and flight and deception have almost disappeared. Spinners therefore aren’t as classical now as they once used to be, which automatically leads to batters not having adequate exposure to those decisive elements.
Then, there is the matter of what kind of pitches we play domestic cricket on. Yes, there is a race for points to qualify for the Super League of the Ranji Trophy, but different bowling attacks have different strengths and therefore the square turners that Test batters encounter aren’t commonplace at the domestic level. Even in the national team’s ‘nets’, while the quality of spin is out of the topmost drawer, the practice pitches are true and predictable. How realistic is it then to expect even accomplished Test batters to tackle the spitting, turning, scooting ball with confidence and surety?
Use of feet is also a rapidly dying art form. A K.L. Rahul, for instance, still leaves the safety of his crease from time to time, but the 33-year-old isn’t entirely a new-age batter in the strictest sense. So do Yashasvi Jaiswal and Rishabh Pant, entirely different beasts from Rahul who have only one thought in their mind – to clear the boundary. But plenty of other batters are reluctant to do so, for obvious reasons. Of course, there is no mandatory requirement for them to use their feet to come down the track because every batter has their own approach and there is no need to follow a templated blueprint, but one can understand the reluctance of most batters to stay put in their safety zone and go at the ball.
Lacking finesse
Twenty20 cricket has given the sport several wonderful new dimensions, with variety in bowling, the addition of new strokes to a once staid and conservative playbook, and the extraordinary rise in fielding and fitness standards topping the charts. Conversely, certainly unintentionally, it has also contributed to taking some of the finesse away from batting, specifically. Range- and power-hitting has become the norm and because batters have become stronger and more powerful and bats have become better with larger sweet spots without becoming commensurately heavier, sitting deep inside the crease and smiting the ball a million miles is the norm. Flat tracks in white-ball cricket encourage this mode of batsmanship. Mishits emanate from over-keenness rather than the ball turning or misbehaving like it does on a surface such as the one at Eden Gardens for the first Test against South Africa. It’s a new-age reality one must reconcile to.
Does this mean India’s batters will continue to struggle against the likes of Tom Hartley and Mitchell Santner and Ajaz Patel and Simon Harmer and Keshav Maharaj, some more accomplished than the others, at home when the pitches assist their craft? On the evidence of what one has seen in the last 13 months, the answer must be a resounding yes. India have the resources to best anyone anywhere, in any conditions, without trying to maximise home ‘advantage’. Indians, players and followers, prided themselves on an unbeaten Test series streak in our backyard for 11 and a half years, until Tom Latham’s New Zealand emphatically burst their bubble last November. That ought to have been a wake-up call, the ultimate affirmation that by laying out Bunsen burners, India were themselves bridging the gulf between their spinners and less celebrated ones from abroad. By refusing to heed that warning and bringing Harmer and Maharaj, a decidedly wily duo, into play against their batters who have found the heat too much to handle, India have shot themselves in the foot.
The writing on the wall can’t be clearer. But, presumably, only to those willing to even look at the said wall.