When he was a child, Anil Kumble wanted to bowl fast. And that is what he started doing, until one day, his elder brother told him he chucked. "I was disappointed but I was forced to change my style and started bowling leg-spin," Kumble told this reporter when he took 6 for 12 in the Hero Cup final against the West Indies in Kolkata in 1994.
On Wednesday, the same Kumble,with that leg-spin of his, became the 9th bowler in the history of the game, only the third spinner and the second Indian after Kapil Dev to bag 400 Test victims.
In a career spanning one-and-a-half-decades, Kumble has had to live with a lot of negative criticism. "He does not spin the ball, he takes wickets only in tailor-made conditions and does not compare favourably with the other great spinners," are some of the comments he has had to hear all these years. It did hurt the man no end and to make matters worse, he was almost dropped from the Indian team that toured Australia at the end of the last year.