Chasm separating spinners of yesteryear and today is widening
Where have the spinners gone
V Ramnarayan
14-Jul-2001
Where have the spinners gone? Every cricket lover asks the question,
despite Harbhajan Singh's phenomenal success against the Australians
and his continued good showing thereafter. The worry is justified as
the Punjab spinner is the exception rather than the rule in a general
poverty of spin. When Anil Kumble comes back, they may strike in
tandem, but in the meantime the selectors have gone back to Rahul
Sanghvi, and he seems to be the best of the current lot of left arm
spinners. At the under-19 level, there are promising young spinners,
but the chasm separating the slow men of the past and the present is
widening all the time, it seems.
Why? Almost all the past masters of the craft agree that today's
spinners do not work as hard or as smartly as they did. In the last
decade or so, I have rarely seen a slow bowler at first class level or
below, who bowls for a couple of hours on the trot at the nets. A VV
Kumar or a Prasanna thought nothing of three hours of bowling
everyday. And they loved every minute of it. It took quite a bit to
separate a cricket ball from me, or my many contemporaries, once one
of us grabbed one to bowl in the nets. A net practice session was a
dress rehearsal for a match; imaginary fields were set to the batsmen
who were challenged to score or defend against such fields, making it
all very competitive.
The most important quality of a spinner is the ability to spin the
ball. Once spinning ability is developed and sharpened, the other
aspects of slow bowling may be cultivated over time, but the reverse
will be impossible to achieve. In the contemporary game, boys start
specializing very early, playing competitive cricket from the under-12
age group onwards. It's too early to start spinning the ball; it's in
fact too early for any specialization. For all he knows, a boy may
have the makings of a fast bowler or may shoot up by the time he is 16
or so, completely unsettling his bowling arc. Most bowlers of my
generation began to specialize only after 16, when their fingers and
limbs were relatively well developed, and they could impart spin
effectively.
Today's young spinners often lack confidence. One possible cause could
be the surfeit of advice and coaching they receive in their formative
years. In old-fashioned parenting, there was much benign neglect,
which enabled boys to be left pretty much alone. Young cricketers too
enjoyed the luxury of benign neglect and thus retained their natural
ability well into adulthood. Today, a talented spinner is
unfortunately taken into hand by well-intentioned mentors who are
frankly not up to the job. The resultant confusion in the young
spinner's mind is not easily undone.
The accumulated wisdom of a couple of generations of quality spinners
has somehow failed to percolate to the present one. Perhaps the
charisma of Kapil Dev Nikhanj shifted the attention away from spin
bowling and led to the emergence of good medium pacers instead.