5 Prestigious Records Ravichandran Ashwin Can Realistically Break
When he won the Player of the Series Award for the Freedom Series, Ravichandran Ashwin made history in more ways than one. He equalled the record for most Player of the Series Awards won by a male Indian cricketer. To put things into perspective, he won his 5 Player of the Series Awards in 12 series, equalling Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar, who won their five in 39 and 74 series respectively.Malcolm Marshall, considered the greatest fast bowler of all time, won 6 of these in 21 series, a mark Ashwin can easily conquer. Only time will tell if Ashwin can win 6 more Player of the Series awards to equal M Muralitharan’s all-time record of 11.However, here are 5 prestigious records that Ashwin can easily conquer to go down as one of the greatest bowlers India has ever produced. Ashwin had a late entry to Test cricket compared to Harbhajan Singh or Anil Kumble, but he is making up for lost time with brilliant performances.Ashwin has it in him to be a genuine all-rounder. But unfortunately for him, Kapil Dev has set the mark way too high, becoming the only all-rounder in the world with 5000 runs and 400 Test wickets. Kumble wasn’t bad either with 600 wickets and 2500 Test runs.
#5 Most ODI wickets by an Indian
For a country that plays a lot of ODI internationals, India surprisingly doesn’t have too many bowlers in the wicket taking charts. For example, Anil Kumble is India’s most successful ODI bowler with 337 wickets in 271 games and he is ninth on the list. Javagal Srinath is the only other Indian bowler with 300 wickets.
Ashwin has 140 ODI wickets in 100 games and is one of the lynchpins for India’s bowling attack. He is very much on target to conquer Kumble’s mark, given that Ashwin is primarily a wicket-taking aggressive bowler of Kumble’s ilk, unlike Harbhajan whose primary inclination in the shorter formats of the game was to control the flow of runs on flat tracks.
Ashwin’s experience early in his career with T20 cricket will stand him in good stead.