Shahbaz Nadeem - Deemed to be good enough?

A stellar campaign for Shahbaz Nadeem in this season’s IPL

Indian cricket has always been associated with flashiness. Batsmen with booming cover drives, spinners with mythical abilities to turn the ball – the list goes on.

Which is why the humble left-arm spinner has largely been a stock option in Indian cricket. Be it Sourav Ganguly‘s dominance over the form or Giles’ stifling of Tendulkar, slow left-arm has always been taken with a pinch of salt. It could be because it is perceived as a negative run-stopping approach instead of a wicket taking one.

The off-spinner flights the ball up enticing the right hander to go for the expansive drive while the leg-spinner is a purveyor of the magical arts making the ball turn away from the batsman using his wrist or sharply turn back into him or even deceiving him with some extra bounce. In comparison to that, left arm orthodox is seen as a collection of darts thrown into the pads of the batsman to prevent him from scoring.

Statistics tell us otherwise. Since the eighties, only five right arm spinners (including both offies and leggies) have taken more than 100 wickets across all formats. This list includes Tendulkar and Sehwag so effectively we are down to Kumble, Harbhajan and Ashwin. During the same period, seven left arm spinners achieved the same feat with Dilip Doshi missing out by four wickets. Admittedly, this list includes Shastri, Ravindra Jadeja and Yuvraj but anyone would accept that the former two are better bowlers compared to Sachin and Viru.

Which brings us to the focal point of this article – Shahbaz Nadeem. A couple of decades ago, someone like Nadeem wouldn’t have passed muster with the national selectors. He plays for Jharkhand, is an unassuming left-arm spinner who lets the ball do the talking and is very often not in the news. From Padmakar Shivalkar to Rajinder Goel to Utpal Chatterjee, the country has produced many such doyens of the Ranji Trophy who would spend their entire cricketing life in whites on sub-standard pitches across the country while parochialism pushed the boys from the big cities to the brink of national selection.

Now the times they are a-changing. Since M.S.Dhoni, two other cricketers from Jharkhand – Saurabh Tiwary and Varun Aaron – have donned national colours. An off-spinning all-rounder from Kashmir has played for the richest team of the IPL. The best young batsmen these days come from Uttar Pradesh and Saurashtra. And two left-arm spinners have played together for India in Test match cricket recently.

Till 2011, Nadeem was a non-entity. Yes he had made his way up from the Under-19 squad and had played in the Challenger Trophy as a teenager but then so many had before him. What differentiated Nadeem from the scores around him was his intent and bravado in tossing the ball up to bait batsmen across the country. Ironically though, he was in a team which paid scant respect to tweakers and preferred the faster men in their place.

In his first season, Nadeem deputised to another left-arm spinner – Roelof Van der Merwe. Van der Merwe played five matches to Nadeem’s four as Delhi went in more often than not with a pace battery that included the likes of Morne Morkel, Irfan Pathan and James Hopes amongst others. For most of the tournament, Nadeem watched his team crash to the bottom of the points table from the sidelines.

2012 was going to be different though.Van der Merwe played only three games as Nadeem and another left-arm spinner Pawan Negi made the XI on a frequent basis and shared 15 wickets amongst them. Both went for around seven an over but Negi had a much better strike rate of 18.8 to Nadeem’s 33.7. Negi could bat too as compared to Nadeem who was a certified tailender.

But the selectors chose to stick to Nadeem as the main spinner based on his match-winning performances against Mumbai and the Deccan Chargers. The gamble paid off as Nadeem went for less than six runs an over in his 12 matches. He was ably supported by Johan Botha this time around who went for 6.54 in his six matches. He was one of the few stars of Delhi’s aborted campaign this year as he bowled with heart and spirit extending his fantastic domestic form – he was the most successful spinner in the 2012-13 Ranji Trophy with 42 wickets – to the IPL. Only one bowler who has played more than ten matches for the Delhi Daredevils has a better economy rate than Nadeem and that bowler is Glenn McGrath who had played 14 matches to Nadeem’s 29.

Clearly, Nadeem has been a wise pick for Delhi and there is no doubt that if uncapped players are eligible for auction next time round, he would get one of the highest bids. He could take an easier route by breaking into the Indian national item although it would be difficult to knock out Ravindra Jadeja and Pragyan Ojha from their perch. But for someone who has gone from an economy rate of 7.47 to 5.88 in three years in the IPL, this would be a challenge he would accept at any cost.