A space for Harbhajan Singh to reinvent himself

Time for reassessment: Instead of hustling into the routine practice sessions this gives him the space to quietly recline on the sofa and allow himself to buy into the thought “What went wrong?”.

Sometimes an astounding defeat is a blessing in disguise. However large and aerodynamic our wings are, gravity makes sure that we land somewhere or the other. And just when we start to think that it couldn’t get any worse, soon we are buried. It has happened to the finest of athletes and greatest of teams. It has happened Pete Sampras, Tiger Woods and to even the once seemingly invincible West Indies cricket team. But how they handle the inevitability of a defeat, even though form abandons them temporarily, is what separating the ‘very good’ from the ‘great’. It is in this stage that Harbhajan Singh finds himself right now.

In early part of his career Harbhajan had to fight hard for a place in the side and he deservedly earned himself one. The famous hat trick at the Eden Gardens is yet to dwindle away from our minds. His inclusion also meant that Kumble had to sit out whenever India fielded a lone spinner in conditions that weren’t spinner-friendly. He remained India’s go-to bowler for quite some time and the passion he exuded with an added guile was reminiscent of the legendary Muthiah Muralitharan in his prime.

“Nothing fails like success,” Richard Carrion was right. Success can sometimes weasel. There came a phase when Harbhajan was almost sure to make to the eleven, given the paucity of spinners in India, and it appeared that he almost started taking his place in the side for granted. The line started becoming predictable; the trajectory got flatter and the loop that deceived the batsmen in the air started fading out of his bowling. He started hogging the headlines for all wrong reasons.

In the last six years, in 136 games, he has just managed 142 wickets at an average of 36.92 and an economy rate of 4.43 as opposed to 117 wickets he picked up in his first 93 matches at an average of 29.11 and an economy rate of 4.11. Even in the recently-concluded-and-seemly-distant World Cup, he only managed to pick up 8 wickets in 8 matches which included three wicket-less games, a vestige of a Harbhajan’s recent form with the ball.

The last five years of Harbhajan’s ODI career have largely been overshadowed by the collective results India managed. The recent ones, especially those in England, being inexplicably abysmal, have inevitably shone light on the fact that his bowling has so insidiously spiraled downwards over the years. This can also be attributed to a tinge of complacency that has prevented him from being the bowler he can, to hold on to the lone spinner place that hardly had any contenders after Anil Kumble’s retirement.

That’s why this downtime is so invaluable because it gives him a much needed break and a time for reflection, something he doesn’t get when he dons the country’s lead spinner cloak and plays cricket ad nauseam. Instead of hustling into the routine practice sessions this gives him the space to quietly recline on the sofa and allow himself to buy into the thought “What went wrong?” It is a beautiful question to ask, something we don’t often ask ourselves on a regular basis, especially when the results we achieve as a team cast shadows on our own performances and goes on to recklessly conceal the reality that we haven’t delivered our best.

Having played in his country’s colors more than a decade, this space presents Harbhajan with two options. He can either misplace the truth that made him a very good bowler, sleep on his past records and end up being just that, or he could dust himself off this quagmire, reassess his career and reinvent himself. The second option might demand of him that excruciating step that a Lionel Messi takes after having eluded all the defenders to score his goal or a Rafael Nadal takes to close the final set and end the game, which has spanned for five hours, on a winning note - it is that finishing step that might probably place him in the realm of greatness.

A cull saw Sourav Ganguly return back a year later as a better test player than he was ever before (1993 runs in his last 25 matches at an average of 46.30) ; Zaheer Khan returned back with a widened repertoire and is now one of the best bowlers in the world; Kumble, whose career could be viewed as to have quilted with two halves, came back and picked up 270 wickets in his last 56 matches.

So must Harbhajan be looking at his omission, for it was not because other spinners are performing better that he was dropped, but to underline the fact that he wasn’t performing as well as he can!