Ravichandran Ashwin, the Encyclopedist

John Arlott said of the great English seamer Maurice Tate that he did not play cricket; he lived in it. The same might be said of Ravi Ashwin, who has retired, somewhat unexpectedly, aged thirty-eight.

He was born into the game — his parents Ravichandran and Chitra were obsessed with his career. He married the game — his wife now runs his cricket academy, Gen Next, and media company, Carrom Ball Media. He covers the world on his YouTube Channel, and is a compulsive communicator on Instagram. In amongst all this, he has harvested 765 international wickets and nearly 5000 runs.

Sometimes cricketers and their cricket are readily separable. Yet it was hard to imagine a conversation with this proud Madrasi that did not circle back to his passion and obsession. He did have other interests, I know. He liked movies, with a special affinity for the cult classic Chennai 6000028. It is, of course, about cricket.

To an outsider, this might make him sound a little….narrow? But there is what you’re interested in, and how you’re interested in it. Few cricketers can have explored the game to such a minute level. Sometimes you wonder whether Australia’s top players see cricket as getting in the way of their golf; they fondly nicknamed Mike Hussey, Ashwin’s Chennai Super Kings colleague, ‘Mr. Cricket’.

But Ashwin’s encyclopedism kind of makes you feel a little proud of cricket, that it could be subjected to a life’s intelligent study, and protective of it too. After all, nobody ever said to Einstein: ‘Gosh, Albert, do you reckon we could talk about something other than physics?’ Or of Steve Jobs: ‘Steve could be a really fun guy if he wasn’t so obsessed with the graphic user interface.’

The argument then becomes whether it is possible to be a genius in such a seemingly esoteric realm. To which the straight-forwardest retort is: cricket in India is anything but trivial. And even if it may be of lesser importance than the fate of nations, then, as Hazlitt observed in his immortal essay on Cavanagh the fives player, what of it?

“It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall — there are things, indeed, that make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played it.”

I commend the appreciations of Ashwin by Kartikeya Date, Jarrod Kimber and his amanuensis Sid Monga, while there has been an impressive range of tributes from CSK past players and I liked the gesture by Pat Cummins’ Australians too.

But what has really enhanced my appreciation of Ashwin in recent times has been reading the coming-of-age memoir he published this year with Sid, I Have The Streets. By convention, cricket memoirs dispose of early life perfunctorily — usually in a chapter called ‘Early Life’ — with rites of passage like the first century, the first five-for etc. That’s not for Ashwin.

He takes you right back to his gully cricket days in Ramakrishnapuram 1st Street, where, for instance, he developed his batting technique of staying leg side of the ball, because he had no pads, and his aptitude for the pull shot, because there were windows straight. He executed his first Mankad, he tells us, aged twelve. Nobody blinked. No wonder he took a hard line later.

Ashwin was also twelve when he suffered his first career-threatening injury — a slipped left hip disc, entailing excruciating treatment. Rather than overstrain the hip, he learned to bat left-handed. He had an unusual, stork-like physique: a short torso, long legs. To adapt, he found a yoga guru. Not a naturally gainly fielder, he spent time teaching himself to slide in the outfield.

The book is particularly instructive in the matter of Ashwin’s coaches. They were tough, ruthless even. In a modern culture when coaches are combinations of friends, companions, sounding boards, enablers, constantly careful not to compromise a player’s individuality, it is fascinating to read of this quite different pedagogy at work.

At the same time, it never curbed Ashwin’s own propensity for experimentation and imitation: ‘Sometimes I copy Harbhajan Singh’s bowling action, whom I consider a hero after he single-handed beat Australia in 2000-1, sometimes Romesh Powar. Sometimes I bowl off spin; on the odd occasion I bowl legs-in with the same action, but I invariably get wickets.’ Ashwin maintained this characteristic throughout his career. He was restlessly tireless, tirelessly restless, immersed in his own game, but also in everyone else’s. Rahul Dravid has a pleasing glimpse of him in his introduction.

“I have seen Paras Mhambrey, our bowling coach, occasionally try to impress something upon him. Ash will verbally duel with him, and it never appears that Paras has been able to fully convince him. And yet, two days later, we will see Ash trying the same thing in the nets all my himself. Then we just look at each other, smile and nod: look, he is actually trying to find out why you asked him to do a certain thing.”

So why now? Why would a player so steeped in the game step down from its international pedestal? I suspect it was not the playing that finally stretched Ashwin thin, but the not playing — the sense of not being guaranteed a place overseas because of India’s dual objectives of lengthening its batting and packing an extra seamer.

Since the last Border-Gavaskar Trophy here four years ago, he had played only nine away Tests, and was unlikely to form part of India’s first-choice XI in England next year. Sunil Gavaskar thinks Ashwin lacks the mental wherewithal to go on in these circumstances, while admitting that it is ‘a bit surprising’.

Still, I’m not sure we should underestimate the toll of fifteen years at the very top of the very top of cricket — membership of the Indian cricket team. In The Tao of Cricket, Ashis Nandy reflected on the extraordinary burden of cricketers in his country — ‘how eleven players with an average age less than thirty and mostly innocent of politics and culture’ must ‘recover the self-esteem of all India.’ It’s a tribute to Ashwin that he made it look like this is what he was born for.

(with permission from Cricket Et Al)

Published - December 22, 2024 06:45 pm IST