The Third Edit: Well played, R Ashwin

Dec 19, 2024 07:14 IST First published on: Dec 19, 2024 at 07:14 IST

There had been signs of his diminishing powers and fitness problems of late, but when Ravichandran Ashwin called time on his India career on Wednesday, it came as a surprise. He had played the recent pink-ball Test in Adelaide and was impressive on a surface which offered him precious little. India are still in the running for a place in the World Test Championship final and getting his hands on a trophy that has remained tantalisingly out of reach thus far could have been a strong temptation. But Ashwin, the cerebral cricketer that he is, would know best where his game and body are at the moment and the thinking of the team management and selectors. With uncertainty about his prospects in the near future and India’s next Test assignment several months away, he must have felt that this was as opportune a time to hang his boots. Ashwin has anyway not been in the selectors’ scheme of things in white-ball cricket for a while now.

Numbers tell the story of his amazing prowess with the ball, even if Ashwin’s batting capability that brought him six Test centuries is set aside. But the real measure of Ashwin as a player was the immense respect he was shown by batsmen regardless of conditions. They knew that he was not dependent on the pitch to bamboozle batsmen and possessed all the tricks — flight, guile, drift, accuracy, side-spin, over-spin and above all, arguably the sharpest brain in cricket. The list of batsmen he has dismissed most often proves that he raised his game against the best in the business.