Against the Spin

Against the Spin presents G’s first post. Disclaimer: Against the Spin takes no liability for anything G has said or will say.

Was watching the highlights of Sunday’s Punjab-Chennai game the other day.  Of particular interest to me were the first few overs of the Chennai Super Kings innings, with Punjab choosing, as has become rather commonplace in IPL 3, to open their bowling with spin at one end.  What was interesting here, however, was that while IPL teams have generally gone for the lanky spear-it-into-leg-from-eight-feet type spinners for this job – the Yusuf Pathans or the Ashwins – Punjab went with the Michelin Man.  Say all you like about how cricket has changed in the last three decades, nowhere is it more apparent than in this particular fact: that the same duties once performed with such athletic vigor by Holding, Thomson and Hadlee are now being carried out by Ramesh Powar, a man whose pretensions to athletic vigor are about as credible as a LalitModian tax return (topical, no?).

First impressions usually tend to reveal a fair bit about people, and a preliminary glance at Powar reveals that he is, in fact, made almost completely of blackcurrant jelly.  However, as with all preliminary glances, this provides an incomplete picture of the man: scientists have successfully demonstrated the geometric impossibility of fitting all of him into a single glance.  Like a fine painting or a classic movie, Powar therefore rewards multiple viewings, each subsequent appraisal unearthing previously unseen facets.  Slow motion replays of him running in to bowl are particularly fruitful in this regard: among the plethora of bouncing parts, each moving slightly asynchronously with the whole, it is usually possible to spot swathes of Powarian flesh hitherto unsullied by the the touch of daylight, popping in and out of view in helpless obedience to the laws of simple harmonic motion governing his more prominent protuberances.

And yet … when he finally releases the ball, tossing it up as close to the vertical as makes no difference in its teasing, tantalizing, excruciatingly slow parabola of precision, one tends to overlook his resemblance to that blimp floating around Chinnaswamy (NB: thank god for those diligent folks at MRF, without whom India would have been blimpless to date).  There is a reason that bowlers like Powar are about as ubiquitous in world cricket as snowballs in hell: it takes some pretty insane cojones to turn up ball after ball and toss up a 50 mph floater to some body-armored bounder wielding a chunk of willow the size of a park bench.  Put aside for a minute the miniscule grounds, the deader-than-a-really-dead-dead-thing pitches; even on the most unresponsive of tracks, a rangy muscular fast man still has a chance of capitalizing on slow reflexes,  allowing him to knock over a couple when the ball is really new/very old/well masticated.  If not that, at the very least he has the fleeting but very real prospect of inflicting some pain to cheer him up. Slow men have no such luxuries: not for them is the thrill of satisfaction that comes from watching the tosser who tried one ramp shot too many suddenly lose his off stump or his left bicuspid (I have yet to see an incident that involved both, but as long as McCullum remains active I have hope).  Instead, given the driveways being played on today, they need to rely on subtle variations of flight and dip, on inducing a mistake rather than producing that outrageously unplayable jaffa.  Above all, they need to have the temerity to stick to this method come what may, the strength of character to overcome the urge to curl up into a fetal position and bawl after being nonchalantly swatted into the midwicket stands by Chris Martin with his Mongoose.

Powar to me epitomizes this bulldog spirit more than most primarily because as a short man (Wikipedia says 5 ft 4 in) he basically has even less options than the average spinner: he is almost compelled to give the ball tremendous amounts of air in order to make it travel the length of the pitch at his pace.  The beauty of his approach lies in the fact that, without worrying about such trifles as economy rates, he has, with some panache and no little gumption, turned this into a unique strength.  Not for him are the tactics employed by most other tweakers of today, those pusillanimous pushers-through, those lily-livered leg-theorists.  With the nonchalance of Indiana Jones reaching through the closing steel doors for his beloved hat, the insouciance that is essential for a man who goes through life looking like a chocolate Pillsbury Dough Boy, the chutzpah necessary to allow oneself to be seen in public wearing shades the color of Kool-Aid, the Mumbai marshmallow tosses it up even further and slows it down even more than any of the famed spinners of yore.

The effect that facing a Powar special has on the average forearms-of-steel-brains-of-concrete-leaking-testosterone-at-the-ears T20 jock looks to be comparable to what administering a suppository while waving a bright red tablecloth three inches from its nose would do to a raging bull.  You can almost see the anticipation in their eyes, the slight smacking of chops, the internal monologue along the lines of  “Alright, I’m gonna launch this pasty little tonker into the next state” as they contemplate one of his floaty, loopy little offerings making its glacial way across the intervening air.  And then, approximately five seconds after completing a glorious arcing swing of pure DLF-sanctioned awesomeness, aforementioned jock then sees the little red cherry still meandering along, pausing to sniff at flowers, taking a contemplative snapshot or two, and then flipping the horrified young tyro the bird before finally coming to a gentle halt after lightly kissing the off bail.  Some of the more enterprising young watzisnames of the IPL have since tried to come up with different means of countering his nefarious modus operandi: advancing so far down the pitch as to be able to give the umpire a quick peck on the cheek, or taking off for a quick chat with one of the cheerleaders after he delivers the ball to kill some time.  As Vijay discovered during the game, however, the incredible amount of loop also translates into appreciable turn, making headlong charges inadvisable – as indeed it would taking one’s eyes off of the ball in order to hobnob with cheerleaders, however personable they may be.

Watching Powar bowl is thus nothing more or less than observing an exercise in calculated deception.  His entire getup, from those ridiculous shades to the paunch to the exaggerated pause in his action, seems designed to distract, to actively elicit underestimation.  Seeing his ostensibly innocuous balloon balls consistently pitch six inches in front of where the batsman expected them to, hold back just enough so that the batsman is fatally early into his shot, repeatedly underscores the fact that he both has the guile to make batsmen implode, and the gonads to put his plans into action without worrying about economy rates and how he looks during the few times that he does get pasted.  In its own way, what Powar brings to the spinners’ table is similar to what Sehwag brought to batsmanship – a unique style of play, seemingly out of sync with how the rest of the cricketing fraternity conducts its business, and yet all the more successful for it.  Characters like him make cricket all the more enjoyable in this era of increasing homogeneity – of grounds, players and pitches – due to their stubborn refusal to conform to type.  And hell, when all is said and done, he STILL manages to keep a lid on the runs without resorting to the leg-stump blockhole banality that seems to be the be all the end all for most other bowlers; as an economy rate of 6.83 in all IPLs to date shows, there is more than one way to peel the epidermal layers off of THAT household feline.

Long may Powar and his ilk thrive; and if he ends up eating the Kings XI Punjab into penury in the process, so much the better – Preity could stand to lose a few.