Is the Indian finger spinner obsolete?

The first comment on the post, The Strange Death of Indian Cricket, Mr Moiz’s now notorious equation of vegetarianism with India’s inability to nurture real fast bowlers, produced, er, deeply felt responses, and whatever we might think of his theory, it’s true that between Ramakant Desai, and Kapil Dev, Chandrasekhar was very nearly our fastest bowler. But more puzzling for the Indian fan is the decline in what used to be Indian cricket’s traditional strength: spin bowling. In the first seven years of this new century we’ve produced a queue of fast-medium workhorses…but not one distinguished spinner.

Once Anil Kumble collects his gratuity and provident fund, Tendulkar and Sehwag will be the only spinners left in the sub-continent, if, as patriotic but honest fans, we admit that Harbhajan should represent India at darts.

What happened to the Indian spinner, especially to left and right arm finger spinners? In the late Sixties, we had not one but two fine off-spinners pushing each other for a place in the Test team, Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkatraghavan. Bishen Singh Bedi was probably the greatest left arm orthodox slow bowler in modern cricket, but just a notch below below him were Padmakar Shivalkar and Rajinder Goel who would’ve played dozens of Test matches if they hadn’t had the misfortune of sharing an era with Bedi. Dilip Doshi, who succeeded Bedi, had a distinguished career despite making his debut after thirty. Even Ravi Shastri, who morphed into a fine opening batsman, had a respectable record as a left arm slow bowler.

But if you look at their successors from the Nineties, the decline is swift. Venkatapathy Raju and Rajesh Chauhan were fine first-class cricketers but they wouldn’t have managed a Test between them in the glory days of Indian spin bowling. And if M Kartik is anything to go by, those days are done. Kartik's slow bowling weapons were those strings of beads and bands wound round his neck and wrists. His plan, I think, was to persuade batsmen that he was a wily oriental. Perhaps he should have bowled in a patka.

This is blasphemous but I'm not sure that Bedi would have survived this epoch of short boundaries, enormous bats and batting instincts honed to ferocity on the whetstone of one-day cricket. I sometimes wonder if flight and moderate turn can work in contemporary cricket. Perhaps the finger spinner isn't so much extinct as obsolete. I can't think of a single one in contemporary cricket of any class apart from Daniel Vettori. Look at Saqlain Mushtaq’s extraordinary decline after the novelty of his take on the doosra wore off. The successful off spinners in contemporary cricket, Muttiah Muralitharan and Harbhajan Singh, are essentially wrist spinners.

The one ray of light for the orthodox left armer is the ugly but effective tactic pioneered by Nasser Hussain when he got Ashley Giles to bowl over the wicket into the rough wide of leg-stump to contain Tendulkar. It worked then and it worked again against the Indians in South Africa. But it’s a containing stratagem, light years from the lovely round-the-wicket aggression of Bedi’s classical style.

I hope I’m wrong about this. Perhaps the dearth of fingers spinners today is a passing phase soon to be remedied by some charismatic practitioner. After all, Abdul Qadir resurrected leg-spin bowling even as nostalgists had begun to lament its extinction. Monty Panesar seems a throwback to the old days in his attitude and the fact that he can’t field or bat seems to augur well: neither could Bedi, Prasanna or Chandrasekhar. And I really like Ramesh Powar: he flights his off-spinners and brings to his art Prasanna’s tubby poise and robustness. The buzz about India’s World Cup team seems to be that he’ll be left out in favour of a seamer. I hope he isn’t: the future a great Indian tradition might be riding on his success.