Although it is still early days in Ashwin’s career but the young lad has looked promising in all forms of the game. I know comparing him with the legend Anil Kumble might make some of the experts of the game laugh but people even laughed when Sachin made his debut as a 16 year old kid & today his success and status is not hidden from the world.
Ashwin has a relentless approach to batsmen & his never say die approach to the game made my mind drift a bit laterally in my opinion of him by comparing him to the great leg spinner Anil Kumble.
“He is a guy who looks forward to challenges and someone who doesn’t like to be in a comfort zone. Mentally he is pretty much up there.”
Ashwin like Jumbo is a perfect mix of relentless accuracy coupled with iron man stamina, and has very subtle variations in pace and deliveries. Success isn’t dependant on the spin he gets, instead his ability to keep bowling at the batsmen constantly and maintaining tight lines & lengths is the mantra of his success.
The lethal carrom ball is one of the weapons in Ashwin’s armoury and is similar to Kumble’s hand grenade of a flipper which left batsmen bamboozled. Like Anil Kumble had to fight his way in to the Indian team and was subjected to all kinds of criticisms, Ashwin replaced the veteran "Turbanator" amidst a lot of cynicism and has not kept him out of the side even for the tour of Australia which itself speaks a lot about the lad’s determination to do well at this level.
Ashwin made his mark with T20 cricket & was labeled as a T20 bowler but his performances in West Indies and England has answered most of the questions asked about his ability to do well at the ODI level. And with 22 wickets in the 3 Tests against the West Indies he has laid to rest any doubts about his ability in the longer version of the game.
Ashwins ability to wrap up the tail makes him all the more deadly. Earlier it was the great man Kumble who was the best in cleaning up the tail. Similarly off the field, both are engineers, and I am sure like the great Anil Kumble, Ravichandran Ashwin will engineer the same destruction of the world’s batsmen. But unlike Kumble, who had to wait for 118 Tests to register his first and only Test century, Ashwin managed to score a century in just his 3rd Test match. And this is just the beginning.