The skill thrives thanks to R Ashwin and Nathan Lyon, but the magic that the wrong’un wielded is all but gone
Osman Samiuddin28-Sep-2024Ten years ago this month, Saeed Ajmal was banned from bowling after the ICC found his action to be illegal. Concern initially had centred around his doosra, though in the Galle Test in which Ajmal was first reported, umpires thought both his offbreak and doosra were suspect. In all they reported approximately 30 deliveries. Testing at an ICC lab two weeks later confirmed their suspicions: every single one of the 37 deliveries Ajmal bowled was delivered with an elbow extension that far exceeded the 15-degree limit.At the time Ajmal was not alone to be called, but he was the most high-profile. The ICC had tightened testing protocols, as well as its resolve. It had empowered umpires to report actions they thought were suspect, with the new process-driven approach taking the stigma and heat – for both umpire and bowler – out of the equation. These weren’t ch***kers endangering the moral fabric of the game anymore. They were athletes with faulty actions that could be rehabilitated. Between June and December that year, umpires reported eight bowlers, six of whom were banned from bowling. Ajmal returned the following year but was not remotely the same. Three ineffective ODIs with a new roundarm action later and he was done.Related
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With him, so too was the doosra. In their 2021 book , Nathan Leamon and Ben Jones found that post-2015 the percentage of balls turning away bowled by an offspinner had all but halved (those that did move away, they concluded, were mostly carrom balls). And the doosra being so critical to the offspinner by then, it was natural to conclude the entire breed’s time was also done. Batting was taking an expansive leap forward, the mind had been freed and the body shaped for power-hitting. More than ever, bowlers needed multiple weapons at their disposal. This was completely the wrong time to have one taken away.
A decade since, in the age of Nathan Lyon and R Ashwin, one could argue those fears were overwrought. Both have shown, in contrasting ways, how rich and resilient and essential offspin remains, and how much about it we still don’t know. Ashwin, in particular, reminds not so much of another bowler as of Ramanujan, or any early Indian math genius, exploring and advancing his discipline in ways the world never thought of. Lyon, meanwhile, has proved that offspin can thrive in Australia, a country in which is perfectly distilled the game-wide indifference to offspin. He’s now just 60 wickets short of the most number of wickets taken by an Australian spinner at home (Clue: no.1 wasn’t an offspinner).Yet look beyond the pair and er… there’s Moeen Ali at number three on the list of highest wicket-taking offspinners (since 2015), and umm, Roston Chase at six and oh really, Joe Root at seven? This is not a list so much as quirky trivia for a quiz (ten points if you guessed that Shoaib Bashir, who debuted literally yesterday, is already 15th on this list).
In stark contrast, check the list for the decade until 2015: Muthiah Muralidaran, Graeme Swann, Harbhajan Singh, Ajmal and then Lyon and Ashwin. Shane Shillingford, who took over 500 first-class wickets, is eighth; Jeetan Patel at tenth took just under 900 first-class wickets. This is serious pedigree. The doosra was a weapon for four of that top ten. All four faced issues with their action.Across white-ball formats the impact is even clearer, with no obvious greats to mask the thinning out of the field. All offspin numbers are anyway on an upward trend since the crackdown: averages, strike rates, economy.
But scan through the top wicket-taking offspinners in ODIs and T20Is in the decade from 2005 to 2014 and it is full of specialist offspinners. And scan through a similar list post-2015 and it is populated by not-quite-offspinners, or offspin-adjacents: allrounders, batters who bowl, mystery spinners and novelties like Liam Livingstone, who bowls both off and legspin (at No. 11, one behind Glenn Maxwell and one ahead of Mahmudullah in T20Is). It’s as if offspinners have been evicted from their own homes.
In T20, offspinners retain some relevance, useful for matchups against left-handers, or for bowling darts in the powerplay. In ODIs, not so much. In all three formats, to be one now is to kind of slip in “offspinner” as the designation behind something shinier, more useful, more efficient, as that one-percenter skill that stands them out.In fact, here’s a crystal-clear illustration of how offspin is no longer the main thing offspinners are expected to do. Between 2005 and 2014, the top ten wicket-taking offies scored 6149 Test runs between them, at 18.63: honest-to-goodness lower-order numbers of players who were primarily bowlers. The top ten since 2015 have 26,623 runs at 31.24 (and even excluding Root, 15,953 runs at 24.88) – the stats of solid allrounders.Having said all this, it’s not like their absence is some gaping wound at the heart of the game. I mean, they’re offspinners. Nobody gets wistful about the slow fade of bank tellers from their lives, do they? And if we’re being honest, spin has been great to watch in the meantime. Leggies rule, and no one will ever complain about too much legspin, though some more in Tests wouldn’t hurt. There’s a new breed of finger-mystery-carrom-ball spinners. SLAs might also be undergoing a sneaky reboot. And you can probably intuit that, like AI, ambidextrous spin is the dark, rampant future.So, spin is fine. But perhaps what we – maybe just me – miss the most is the doosra itself. Because has any one delivery transformed a constituency as much as this in the modern age? The offspinner was always worthy, but in a humdrum sort of way, boring batters out with broadly orthodox and honest means. With the doosra, they were suddenly armed with a tool for outright deception. Think back to when you first learnt that essential life lesson, that lying isn’t a bad thing. Remember how thrilling that was? Well, this was that. Life could never be the same again.Saqlain Mushtaq: brought sexy back to offspin•Michael Steele/Getty ImagesIt says everything about the two kinds of spin that it took offspin nearly a century longer than legspin to get this, but when it arrived, in the mid-’90s with Saqlain Mushtaq, man alive, was it worth it. None of us can truly know what it was like when the googly was first unleashed, but no way could it have matched this.In those early sightings especially, people were losing their minds not knowing what to do. Batters top, middle and lower were all falling over, in disbelief and in something approaching disgust, at having been so thoroughly grifted by a mere offie. Commentators didn’t know what it was, a topspinner, a drifter, the one that goes straight on, but all, as one, were marvelling at it. And the name itself, this most mundane and functional of words, assuming an aura. Imagine, a mere instruction from Moin Khan to bowl the other one, now exoticised and weaponised like a lost word from a great Mughal poem or a heroic tactic from some epic colonial battle. This is how chicken tikka masala became a thing, right? Anyway, power in the game was changing hands and the doosra felt like an inside joke, a little sniggering prank from those who were now running the game on those who had once run it.For a while, offspinners strutted the earth like they owned it, and if the collateral damage was that even part-timers were transformed, then sure, we could live with that. The early-to-mid-2000s was a time of dead surfaces across the subcontinent unlike, say, India, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka now. The doosra, we understood, was the offspinner’s Swiss Army knife, their essential survival tool.It lived fast but it faded quick too. Murali’s doosra doesn’t count in the lineage because he was, essentially, a wristspinner, but Saqlain himself and then the likes of Harbhajan after him, started relying on it too much, stripping away its mystery. Ajmal, by the time he was reported, had also been bowling it to death.Which leaves to its credit some YouTube nostalgia and, albeit indirectly, fewer suspect actions. Between 2005 and the end of 2014, umpires reported 91 suspect actions to the ICC. Since 2015, there have been 58. Also, less toxic discourse. The clampdown ended up affecting mostly those who bowled the doosra but in its reliance on science and process, in its cold bureaucratic approach to each case, the ICC deflated the moral hyperventilating that had marked the matter for decades.And that is something we definitely don’t miss.