Indian Spinners: The new Fab Four
India has been the land of spinners for decades. From the days of Bishen Singh Bedi, Chandrasekhar & Venkataraghavan in the 70's to the days of Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh in the last decade, India has always produced world-class spinners.
Continuation of this tradition of producing great spinners has not only been maintained but at present, it has been taken to an all new level.
With the likes of R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Jadav and Yuvendra Chahal (The new Fab Four of Indian Cricket) in our rank, this is surely India's Golden generation of Spin Attack.
Unfortunately, the number of slots for spinners in a team is always limited. As a result of this, the "Fab Four" of Indian Spin Attack, hardly gets a chance to play together.
Each of them is playing in a specific format only. And in spite of being match winners in the format in which, each of them plays, they are finding it difficult to make the playing eleven in the other formats.
In this article, the achievements of this Fab Four of present Indian Spin Attack will be looked into.
#1 Ravichandran Ashwin:
This 31 year old Off Spinner from Chennai has been the biggest match winner for India in the Test matches over the last 5-6 years. Filling into the big boots of Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh and taking over the responsibility of leading the Indian Spin attack, Ashwin has not only been successful in meeting the expectations but has exceeded it.
He has been the fastest to reach 300 wickets in the history of Test cricket surpassing greats like Denis Lillee and Mularitharan. His tally of 316 Test wickets in 58 test matches is just phenomenal. (More than 5 wickets per Match). With another 150 wickets in One Day Internationals and more than 50 T20 wickets, he has been a match winner for India in all formats of the game.
He has also been the most successful proponent of the "Carrom Ball", a new variety of delivery, in the game of cricket.
It is not only with the ball that Ashwin has contributed to India's success. As a Test Match batsman also he has scored more than 2000 runs with 4 hundreds at an average of more than 30.
Ashwin has undoubtedly been the most successful all-rounder for India after Kapil Dev. He has been consistently ranked as one of the top test bowlers as well as allrounders for the last few years. He is surely one of the all-time great Indian players. With almost a decade of International cricket ahead of him, there are many more milestones for Ashwin to achieve.
However, because of the meteoric rise of youngsters like Chahal and Kuldeep Yadav, Ashwin has lost his place in the Indian ODI and T-20 side and it would be sad if a great like him, fails to make the 2019 World Cup squad.