Wait over, Mishra redeems himself
A successful IPL where he impressed with his control, skill, and a shrewd mind, helped Mishra get back to the Indian team. File
For someone who is seen as nondescript, Amit Mishra makes appearances in the oddest of places — in a police FIR, in a hair-weaving poster hanging on a decrepit parapet in dimly-lit city alleys. Increasingly, and luckily, he has also been spotted fist-pumping on a cricket field quite a lot in the recent times.
Legspinners are the glamour boys of cricket. Even those leggies who aren’t gregarious souls are feted for their art. The television cameras love them and binge on close-ups of their quirky actions, malleable wrists, and the fingers that squeeze out the ball. Even when they are just standing, the cameras fuss about the way they flip the ball from one hand to other. Amit Mishra isn’t one of those spinners though.
Over the years, he has had to wait — wait for the selectors to notice him, wait for captains to show faith, wait for the fortunes to change, wait for the fans to cheer, wait for the cameras to frame him. Nothing has come easily, and not everything has come yet. When he turned the ball more than any other spinner in the country, we shrugged it off by saying, ‘Too slow, sorry, try again’. He didn’t get many games when MS Dhoni was the captain and on his infrequent cricket tours, he would be generally seen hanging out with the players from Delhi, and making guest appearances in a game or two.
Understandably, all that fretful waiting had affected him. Joy had ebbed away from his cricket and life in general and he started to stress even more about selections. He has somehow managed to extricate himself from self-pity and incessant negativity and after a successful IPL where he impressed with his control, skill, and a shrewd mind, he was back in the Indian team for the Sri Lankan tour.
In the times he has been out of the Indian team, he had realised that he had to tinker around with his bowling to push his case. He was slow through the air, much slower than now, and it did set him back. You could understand why Dhoni wasn’t picking him. He could get the ball to turn but couldn’t rush the batsmen into making mistakes. He has worked on it and now, though he is still slower than Ashwin and Jadeja, and hence an easy selection casualty on sluggish tracks, he does crank it a lot more than he used to. In that sense, he reminds one of Narendra Hirwani, whose international career took a hit because of the slowness off the track.
Mishra has a few variations but nothing that makes for dramatic visuals. There is that retro front-of-the-hand way to push out straight deliveries, a googly that he uses sparingly, the occasionally used unremarkable sliders, and couple of legbreaks — one that turns more, another that doesn’t as much. But here is the thing — it’s how he has whipped up all these simple elements into a wholesome package that has aided his success these days. Strung together with a sense of purpose, he has looked a much better bowler than before. One turns more, other spins just a bit but on his good days, both have a similar look and feel when they slip out of his hand.
A new captain who trusts him more couldn’t have but helped. In a recent interview to BCCI.TV, the bowling coach Bharat Arun talked about that aspect.
“Handling a leg-spinner properly is extremely important, and that’s where Virat has played a major role. He gave him the kind of confidence that a leg-spinner needs and deserves. That has paid rich dividends. Mishra is a readymade bowler. When he walked into the Test side in Sri Lanka, he had 500-odd first-class wickets under his belt.”
One of the “readymade” traits is his accuracy. The other day Virat Kohli talked it up as the quality he likes in Mishra. If he hears that, Hashim Amla would nod his head with a sigh for he has been unable to trust Imran Tahir’s accuracy and has been forced to use him sparingly even on rank turners. Kohli has no such problem with Mishra.
A factor that wasn’t readymade, though, was fitness. It’s something that Mishra has worked a lot on this year and something has helped his bowling. Someone who has had to make a conscious effort to not to slip back to slow-through-air stuff but keep ripping it ball after ball, greater strength and endurance has been a great boon.
There is a greater self-confidence. A man who was once unsure of his place now walks up to the captain and says he shall take a wicket. “When the partnership (between Amla and du Plessis) was going on, he actually held the ball and told me that ‘I will get a wicket’ and in about three overs he got Hashim out. He was feeling confident and that as a captain is a pleasing thing to hear, a bowler wanting to take the ball and saying that ‘I will get you a wicket’.
In Mohali, too, he got AB twice in two innings and that is a big wicket in the course of a Test match. Mishra getting us those crucial breakthroughs, he has been very important for us as a bowling unit. He showed that in Sri Lanka as well, bowled really well in his comeback series and has gained a lot of confidence from that,” Kohli said after wrapping up the Test series in Nagpur.
In a delicious irony, the two deliveries that helped India dispose of two stubborn South Africans and win the Test were really slow. His slowness had outdone the slowness of the pitch.
