Emerging from a puff of dust, the spinning ball slipped through the gap between a driving bat and Vernon Philander’s pads and thumped into the top of the middle stump. It was with this classic off spinner’s dismissal that Ravichandran Ashwin clapped his way to his 21st Test five-wicket haul on home soil, picked up in his very first Test appearance since December last year.
The Philander wicket was of great significance to Ashwin’s legacy too; he is now just three wickets away from reaching the landmark of 350 Test wickets. If he scalps those in the ongoing Visakhapatnam Test itself—and there is no reason why he shouldn’t— Ashwin will be tied-fastest to the milestone (66 Tests), on par with the greatest wicket-taker of them all, Muttiah Muralitharan, and 11 Tests quicker than the Indian record-holder for the same feat, Anil Kumble.
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Setting a breakneck and record pace in achieving an enormous haul—doesn’t that make him one of the finest bowlers in the game right now? Yet the Indian team management, led by captain Virat Kohli and coach Ravi Shastri, consistently keep him out of the side. Since January 2018 alone, Ashwin has missed seven Test matches that India have played in, and only three of them to injury.
In Johannesburg last year, in Sydney this year and also the two-match Test series in the West Indies after the World Cup, a fully fit Ashwin was not picked in the playing eleven. But again, Kohli dropped Ashwin from his team the very first time he captained in Test cricket, during the Adelaide Test of 2014 when he stood in for MS Dhoni. Incidentally, Australia’s off spinner Nathan Lyon went on to take 12 wickets in that very match.
{{/usCountry}}In Johannesburg last year, in Sydney this year and also the two-match Test series in the West Indies after the World Cup, a fully fit Ashwin was not picked in the playing eleven. But again, Kohli dropped Ashwin from his team the very first time he captained in Test cricket, during the Adelaide Test of 2014 when he stood in for MS Dhoni. Incidentally, Australia’s off spinner Nathan Lyon went on to take 12 wickets in that very match.
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Ashwin’s exclusion from the final Test of India’s historic series win in Australia this year was perhaps the most curious case of the lot. A day before the Sydney match Kohli announced in the press-conference that Ashwin was ruled out with an injury and promptly went on to talk about how part-time spinner Hanuma Vihari “has looked like picking up a wicket whenever he comes to bowl”. Then, two hours later, the team management announced a 13-man squad with Ashwin’s name in it. Ashwin was even seen rolling his arm over on the morning of the Sydney Test, but five-Test-match-old Kuldeep Yadav was picked instead. Yadav went on to star with a five-for himself. That instance, followed by Ashwin not making the cut in India’s next set of Test matches in Antigua and Jamaica last month, made India’s former players wonder what the future held for Ashwin.
“Ashwin should be a certainty. The fact that he has not been made to feel the comfort level is the reason why we are seeing him struggle a little bit,” Sunil Gavaskar said in the Star Sports studio during the lunch break on Friday, after the Indian bowlers had witnessed a wicketless first session. “Somebody who has got almost 350 wickets can’t be sidelined as regularly as he has been.”
On the other hand, Harbhajan Singh, Test cricket’s second most successful off spinner, tried to second guess the team management’s thought process with respect to Ashwin. “I think he is not a regular maybe because when we are touring abroad, the team management wants a match-winner on wickets that are not so conducive to spin bowling. This is why I think he isn’t a certainty,” Harbhajan told HT. “Having said that, taking 350 wickets so quickly is a great achievement.”
Ashwin, meanwhile, addressed the presser in Vizag and spoke about what it felt like to not be a part of the Indian team for close to a year.
“I stopped reading about the game and I actually stopped watching the game for a brief period of time,” he said. “I felt like every time I watched the game on TV, I wanted to play. I just wanted to play. I thought I was missing out from the team.”