Trick of the wrong hand: Is left-arm spin the way forward?

Shahbaz Nadeem of Delhi Daredevils

Perhaps no writer has evoked such a concrete image of the art of left-arm spin bowling in action as Gideon Haigh did. The Australian journalist once in describing Dilip Doshi’s bowling wrote, “What left the strongest impression (about Doshi) was how long he could make it hang in the air, as though suspended in a cobweb.”

The victim was former Indian coach Greg Chappell who “turned on his heel without trying to remake his ground, bowed his head penitently, and stripped off his gloves in his few strides for the pavilion. ‘Too good,’ he seemed to say, ‘too good.’”

Left-armers are exotic species and hence, probably, grab eyeballs as and when they appear on the scene. Paul Adams’ created a lot of ruffle in international cricket before ebbing away; Ashley Giles made noise because of him being the exponent of Nasser Hussain’s leg-side theory against Tendulkar.

Still, left-arm spin bowling is less-fancied compared to the other available varieties of spin bowling. It is understandable because it is a taxing art and also comes with its fair share of risks. Though in the drifting-away-of-the-delivery they share the same principle with leg-spin bowlers, the process that works behind the final product is much different.

“The leftie uses his thumb and two fingers. The leggie relies on his wrist,” writes Christian Ryan in ESPNcricinfo. Our wrist, unlike our fingers, has the advantage of being bendable even with the ball in hand. “It might lead us to theorise that the leftie physiologically lacks the leggie’s capacity to make a ball squirt, hang, drift, drop or hurry on after pitching,” asserts the writer.

But there have been players of the caliber of Bishen Singh Bedi, Dilip Doshi, Derek Underwood, Alf Valentine and Philip Lock who have ruled our hearts in different eras. Even the lesser ones like Ashley Giles, Paul Harris and Mehrab Hossain have troubled the Tendulkars and Pietersens of cricket. Sadly, however the quality has gone down. Apart from Daniel Vettori there’s no one who can even set their sight on greatness. Reason for the decline can be many, but the growth should start from the roots.

If T20 cricket is the game’s way ahead, are left-arm spinners also becoming an inseparable part of cricket’s future?

If that is so, then the T20 leagues have provided a fine platform for this dying art. One could witness abundance of them during the Bangladesh Premier League earlier this year. Now in the IPL, they are already a hot property. A baffling number of 16 left-arm spinners are currently playing in the tournament: Ravindra Jadeja and Shadab Jakati (Chennai), KP Appanna and Daniel Vettori (Bangalore), Pragyan Ojha (Mumbai), Shakib al Hasan and Iqbal Abdulla (Kolkata), Ankeet Chavan and Brad Hogg (Rajasthan), Murli Kartik (Pune), Shahbaz Nadeem, Roelof van der Merwe and Pawan Negi (Delhi), Ankit Sharma (Deccan), Bhargav Bhatt and Bipul Sharma (Punjab). And these are only the specialist bowlers; the part-timers like Michael Clarke haven’t even been counted.

While the puritans rue over the fact that bowling is becoming uni-dimensional, they can’t argue that most of these players have had profound impact on their teams’ success. Jadeja, Appanna, Nadeem and Negi have all churned out at least one match-winning bowling effort; players like Kartik have been put to perfect strategic use by their captains at different points of time.

The left-arm spinners are blessed. They have the ability to lure the batsmen into play. It works to their advantage even more in the shortest format of the game that requires fast scoring. Maybe, by this logic one can explain Pragyaan Ojha’s success in the IPL over the years. So stretching it a bit further, if T20 cricket, as some believe, is the game’s way ahead, are left-arm spinners also becoming an inseparable part of cricket’s future?