He out-bowled Jadeja and Washington and revealed gaps in India’s spin-bowling cupboard
Karthik Krishnaswamy25-Nov-20253:19
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If you are an India fan, Tuesday may have brought a weird sense of déjà vuIndia, dominating a home Test and sitting on a massive lead, bat on and on into the last session of day four. Social-media explodes with complaints that they are scoring too slowly, delaying the declaration for too long.They declare when one of their batters is dismissed in sight of a hundred. More disgruntlement, because personal milestones yadda yadda.Then R Ashwin comes on, takes the new ball, and shuts everyone up. With just his second ball, he beats an opener in the air with drift and dip, and bowls him through the gate. He cycles through his changes of pace and trajectory like a virtuoso, never giving up his length.At stumps, the opposition, chasing an improbable total, are 27 for 2 and staring at defeat.Except it isn’t India doing the dominating but South Africa. Except this tall offspinner in sunglasses isn’t Ashwin. It’s Simon Harmer, and he’s looking like the most threatening spinner on either side.Simon Harmer has picked up 12 wickets in this series against India•BCCIHarmer has given this impression right through this series — unplayable on a Kolkata pitch offering square turn and uneven bounce, and a class above the rest on a flat, true red-soil pitch in Guwahati. He’s been able to bowl at 92kph and hurry batters’ responses to unpredictable behaviour off the first pitch, and to hang it above their eyeline at 78kph and scramble their judgment of line and length on the second.No one in the opposition — no fingerspinner, at any rate — has been able to match Harmer’s range. And the opposition is India.Related
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This is Test cricket in India in 2025, and it’s all upside-down.”I don’t know if we’re better,” South Africa head coach Shukri Conrad said, when asked if Harmer and Keshav Maharaj made up a better spin attack than India’s in conditions like Guwahati. “I think we’re just used to these conditions a lot more. Because back home, the spinners don’t bowl in spin-friendly conditions.”So I think our defensive game is better. If you look at the Indian spinners, I think they’re used to bowling on wickets that are conducive to spin bowling. So the pace they bowl at, the ball reacts a lot quicker, which makes them a lot more dangerous.”I think back home, our spinners are forced to bowl with a little bit more guile and a little bit more variation. And it certainly stood us in good stead coming here, on a good wicket like this, where we’re able to play with our flight, play with our lines and lengths a bit more: overspin, sidespin, all of the variations that are needed.”So I don’t think we’re better than them. I think we might just be slightly better-equipped in these conditions.”2:10
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This seemed to be true right through this Test match, particularly if you compare only the fingerspinners. Harmer and Maharaj were far more comfortable bowling slower through the air, with more overspin, and giving the ball a chance to dip and bite into the surface.KL Rahul’s dismissals in both innings summed up the challenge they posed: he stretched forward both times, got nowhere near the pitch of the ball both times, edged Maharaj off the shoulder of his defensive bat in the first innings, and played all around a Harmer offbreak ripping out of the footmarks in the second.During India’s first innings, a graphic went up on TV showing the speeds of the two teams’ fingerspinners. Where Harmer and Maharaj bowled at average speeds of around 83kph with their slowest balls clocking around 77kph, Ravindra Jadeja and Washington Sundar clocked average speeds of around 91kph and slowest speeds of around 83kph.India appeared to recognise the need for reduced speed during South Africa’s second innings. Washington bowled a long spell on the fourth morning, with conspicuous amounts of overspin and at speeds typically in the mid-80s rather than the low 90s, and generated impressive dip and bounce, getting Temba Bavuma caught at leg slip with one that sprang at his gloves.By then, of course, South Africa were well ahead of the game.KL Rahul was done in by a jaffa from Simon Harmer on Tuesday•AFP/Getty ImagesNow it’s important to note that they didn’t get there simply because their spinners were better-equipped to bowl on a flat pitch. They won the toss and made use of the best batting conditions of the match to pile up 489. When India batted, they were under scorecard pressure — which included being 1-0 down in the series — and on a pitch that was beginning to do just a little bit more.And as well as Harmer and Maharaj bowled in the first innings, two of their four wickets came off short balls that happened to do unusual things. The towering left-arm quick Marco Jansen was their chief gamebreaker with first-innings figures of 6 for 48.And as limited as Jadeja and Washington may have looked in the first innings, they were bowling on a most unhelpful surface.”Honestly, as a bowler, when we were bowling on the first two days, there wasn’t a single mark on the wicket,” Jadeja said. “It was sparkling like a mirror. And when they [South Africa] began bowling, and in the situation they were in, their fast bowler taking wickets brought their spinners into play. And they were getting the ball to turn and bounce as well.”The situation matters a lot in cricket. If it had been flipped around, and we had been 300 runs ahead when they came in to bat, we could have potentially been winning by a big margin. The toss isn’t in anyone’s hands, and winning and losing the toss is part of the game, but it does have an effect. When you’re bowling first and nothing is happening off the wicket, then your spinners look ordinary. But when you are 300 runs ahead, all your bowlers will look good.”2:16
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Lost tosses have haunted India through both this home series and the one they lost 3-0 to New Zealand last year. But even there, during the Pune Test match, India — even with Ashwin in their ranks — weren’t able to match Mitchell Santner’s ability to vary his speeds, particularly down into the 70s, on a pitch that looked more responsive when the spinners bowled slower.Sometimes, it’s just a question of styles. Jadeja is one of cricket’s greatest-ever left-arm spinners, one of the few in history who has been able to bowl accurately at above 90kph while giving the ball enough of a rip to turn it square if he has just enough help from the pitch. On Tuesday, he bowled Aiden Markram with one such ball that turned past the outside edge to hit the top of off. Jadeja’s career is littered with such balls.And when there’s no help from the pitch, Jadeja excels at controlling the scorecard with his unerring lengths, and at varying his release positions on the crease to keep batters hyper-vigilant. What he isn’t particularly known for is varying his pace through the air.It’s understandable that a bowler with his record — no left-arm spinner with 150-plus Test wickets has a better average than his 25.11 — would trust his methods and be reluctant to depart from it in the middle of a Test match.But in their recent trend towards preparing square turners at home, India may have habituated their spinners into bowling in a square-turner sort of way. And in following this template, they may have also prioritised square-turner qualities — air speed, control, the ability to extract natural variation, and also the ability to extend India’s batting depth — in their selection of fingerspinners over recent seasons. Washington and Axar Patel, like Jadeja, tick all these boxes. With Ashwin now retired, there’s no fingerspinner with more old-fashioned traits in India’s Test squad.India’s spinners have struggled to make an impact in the series against South Africa•Associated PressThey do, however, have Kuldeep Yadav, a wristspinner who excels at the things these fingerspinners aren’t comfortable doing. Giving the ball loop, delivering with high overspin, varying his speeds — typically from the high 70s to the mid-80s, and of late into the early 90s too — and deceiving batters in the air. And these qualities had been at the forefront when he took three wickets on day one of this Guwahati Test.After that, though, Kuldeep became a marginal presence, with India’s stand-in captain Rishabh Pant showing a reluctance to give him long spells. After introducing Kuldeep via a seven-over passage broken by a change of ends, Pant did not give him a single spell in either innings that extended past a fifth over.This didn’t seem like the best use of a serious attacking threat, because spinners usually like bowling long spells that allow them to build a rhythm and settle into their lengths and speeds. Perhaps Kuldeep didn’t get to do this because India were already more worried about scoreboard control than wickets by day two, and perhaps because shorter spells are often a byproduct of three-spinner attacks.And perhaps Kuldeep, too, is unused to heavy workloads because he’s habituated to bowling in shorter innings on more helpful pitches. Even during his eight-wicket match haul against West Indies on a slow, low Delhi pitch last month, he had begun menacingly before losing a bit of sting with more overs under his belt.In every way, then, India’s tendency, dating back to early 2021, to play most of their home Tests against strong oppositions on pitches that turn sharply and early may have left them in an odd situation when a surface like Guwahati’s comes along.3:49
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Through the 2016-19 period, when India mostly played home Tests on true pitches, Ashwin and Jadeja had out-bowled every visiting attack, most of them comprehensively, bowling with better control, at a more challenging pace, while giving the ball a bigger rip. Since then, though, touring sides have learned from India’s successes, and built spin attacks better-suited to Indian conditions.This has generally meant that their spinners have become more comfortable bowling at higher speeds, and attacking the stumps more: Nathan Lyon in 2023, for instance, and Harmer in Kolkata looked right at home bowling like India’s bowlers.But these spinners also bowl a lot on less helpful pitches, in international and domestic cricket, and get the chance to develop other facets of their game. When they need to try and beat batters in the air, or bowl long, patient spells of high overspin and land on footmarks wide of off stump, they know what to do, and have a feel for it.These aren’t things that India’s fingerspinners — at least those who are currently in and around the Test squad — particularly excel at. And it can hurt them overseas too. Jadeja, so used to attacking the stumps, struggled to land the ball in the rough outside Ben Duckett’s off stump when he kept reverse-sweeping him at Headingley in June. It recalled Ashwin’s struggle to bowl the same sort of line to England’s right-hand batters during the 2018 Southampton Test when Moeen Ali slipped into that mode with ease.Harmer’s displays in this series, then, have shone a revealing light on the gaps in India’s spin-bowling cupboard. Every team would kill to have even one of India’s three spin-bowling allrounders, but it may not be in India’s best interests to pack their squad with so many fingerspinners of broadly similar strengths, and to keep playing them on tracks that stifle their growth into more rounded bowlers. Playing on a steady diet of such tracks may not be in the best interests of their wristspinner either.India, in short, have enviable spin-bowling depth, but their spinners, quite possibly, are no longer the best in the world across conditions.