Turning point: Amit Mishra spins it his way
IT was the kind of delivery you would be expected to bowl to your five-year-old nephew who’s holding a bat twice his size. Based solely on the pace it was bowled at and the teasing, almost mocking, flight with which it was tossed up. Instead it was a Test batsman, well a tail-ender who can hold his bat, who was at the receiving end.
And Dhammika Prasad’s response too was rather meek. He stretched out his front-foot — almost in slow-motion — let the ball dip and grip the surface and watched on bemusedly as it turned, bounced and took the splice of his bat en route to Ajinkya Rahane at slip.
It was so simple that Amit Mishra didn’t even feel the need to celebrate with much gusto — this despite being a milestone scalp, his 50th. He did jump up and down with child-like delight after having gotten the better of his next victim though. He deserved to as well. This one wasn’t as slow or given the kind of air as the Prasad delivery. But it did exhibit that other great skill Mishra has always possessed, and made great use of to deceive batsmen. The drift.
Jehan Mubarak was well-set by then. To his credit he did the right thing by using his gargantuan reach by placing the front-foot right out towards the pitch of the ball. But at the last moment the ball drifted in the air past the line of his bat, pitched, and turned right back in to hit his stumps. Mubarak didn’t know what hit him, or his stumps, for that matter.
But Mishra, who would eventually finish with figures of 4/43 — the best among Indian bowlers — knew exactly what trick he had pulled out of his bag. The fourth wicket too was a classic, Tharindu Kaushal jumping out his crease, and being beaten by a leg-break to be stumped.
When Mishra made his Test debut seven years ago against a clueless Australian batting line-up, it was heralded as the rebirth of classical leg-spin. Two years had passed since the retirement of Shane Warne. And the baton seemed to have been passed on to Mishra to keep the flame burning for the enigmatic vocation.
But while it was his ability to beat batsmen in the air that got him his wickets at the P’Sara Oval, it’s also been at times a bugbear for Mishra. For, whenever queries have been raised about the Indian selectors’ fickle-mindedness regarding his selection, the reasons for him being benched or dropped are the same, “He’s too slow to be successful in the modern-day game.”
It’s one of the reasons he never quite enjoyed the confidence of MS Dhoni during his reign, and maybe why his appearance in Galle was the first in Tests since August 2011.
While he’s waited his turn, picking up wickets in domestic cricket consistently, India’s quest for a leg-break bowler has seen the likes of Piyush Chawla and even Karn Sharma get a go in place of Mishra. For many, the diminutive leggie’s career seemed to have reached that stagnation point where a comeback doesn’t seem likely. And it was as the third-choice spinner that he was picked for Sri Lanka. In two weeks here though, he’s already leapfrogged Harbhajan Singh into being R Ashwin’s accomplice.
Prior to the second Test, Mishra spoke in depth about the pace variations he had brought into his game, and they have been on show so far. At some level, he seemed compelled to do so. If earlier he used to bowl five deliveries an over at less than 80 kph, he’s now mixing them up with a few that don’t dip as much and rip off the surface. The pace variations have also made his googly a lot more difficult to pick, like Kaushal Silva found out in the second innings of the Galle Test.
With 9 wickets at 13.77 apiece, Mishra has been as decisive a threat as Ashwin for the Lankans, and like he proved on Saturday he’s done that by sticking to his original, classical strengths rather than get swayed too much by general opinion.
