Ravichandran Ashwin will leave massive shoes to fill behind when he goes, and given the state of affairs in domestic cricket at the moment, India are nowhere near prepared for it, writes Naman Agarwal.

Since the Delhi Test against West Indies in 2011, India have played 55 Test matches at home. A total of 50 Indian players have featured in these 55 Tests. Only seven have played more than half of them. And only one has played all – Ravichandran Ashwin.

Everyone knows by now that Ashwin is good. Or perhaps a little better than that. No one has taken more wickets than him in home Tests since his debut. Only one bowler has taken more wickets than him overall. And only two bowlers with a cut-off of 250 wickets have a better average than him since his Test debut.

India might be benching him more than playing him in overseas Tests currently, but come Test matches in the subcontinent, an India line-up without Ashwin becomes as unfathomable as a train without its engine. Because that is exactly what Ashwin is. The engine room of the Indian Test team in the subcontinent.

He guarantees you wickets and provides you the cushion of a Test batting average of 27. In fact, for the sake of all arguments, let’s completely forget Ashwin’s batting credentials. As a pure off-spinner, what Ashwin has provided for over a decade, is gold dust. He is one of the best off-spinners Test cricket has ever seen.

But he is 36 already and will be close to 39 by the time the current cycle of the World Test Championship ends. As much as the India team and fans would like to brush this fact under the carpet so that they are able to sleep peacefully, they’ll have to come to terms with it somewhere over the next two years. And make no mistake, it will be an uncomfortable encounter with reality.

The dearth of off-spinners in India

Spin bowling, off-spin bowling, in particular, has long been synonymous with cricket in India. Not only have India produced some of the best traditional off-spinners over the years, but they have also produced batters who have played off-spin, or any type of spin, the best.

Both those statements might be changing. If you look at the numbers of off-spinners in Indian domestic cricket in the last few years, it will paint a scary picture.

Among the top 20 spinners in Indian first-class cricket in the subcontinent (excluding Test matches and matches against North-East Zone and Plate division teams to ensure that numbers are not spiked due to dilution in quality of opposition) since the 2019/20 Ranji Trophy, only five are off-spinners, and only four have taken more than 40 wickets.

The most successful off-spinner in Indian domestic cricket since it resumed after the pandemic has been Jalaj Saxena. He has taken 103 wickets overall, out of which 89 have been against non-North East and non-Plate Division teams.

However, if you think that he is the solution to the Ashwin replacement problem, he is not. In fact, he is 36 as well, and the India selectors seemed to have moved on from him as is evident by his non-selection in the Duleep Trophy.

The combined bowling average of all Indian spinners who have taken 15 or more wickets in first-class cricket in the subcontinent (with the same constraints as mentioned earlier) is 28.09. If you try to look for off-spinners who have done better than that (look for entries to the left of the vertical line running through the middle of the chart below), you'll find eight names.

Of those eight names, only two are below 30 years of age. If you increase the average cut-off to 30, that number jumps up to barely three. That's right. Only three Indian off-spinners aged less than 30 at the moment, have taken 15 or more first-class wickets at an average of less than 30 in the last three years: 22-year-old Yuvraj Dodiya of Saurashtra, 28-year-old Pulkit Narang of Services, and 24-year-old Tanush Kotian of Mumbai.

In the last few years, whenever India have needed a second off-spinner to partner (or replace Ashwin), they have gone to either Jayant Yadav or Washington Sundar. Yadav is 33 at the time of writing and will be 35 by the time this WTC cycle ends. Sundar is extremely injury prone and might not make the Test team if not for his batting.

Is Ashwin the last of his kind?

While India have a readymade back-up for Ravindra Jadeja in the form of Axar Patel, with Kuldeep Yadav being the fourth spinner in the pecking order, the lack of young, upcoming off-spinners in the domestic circuit is alarming. More so because this is a role that is currently being fulfilled by one of the greats of the game. When he goes, India need to have people ready to take over to soften the blow. The way things are going at the moment, the blow will be anything but soft.

With T20 cricket taking over the world, this decline of interest in traditional off-spin makes sense, unfortunate as it is. Turning the ball away from the batter has always been an advantage. T20 cricket has amplified that.

Players are growing up playing more and more T20 cricket, forcing them to develop relevant skills. There's not much incentive to loop the ball above the eye line of the batter and try and deceive them with drift, dip, and turn as an off-spinner. You'll either be hit over your head or slog-swept over mid-wicket for six. And if neither of those, you'll be reverse-swept over point. And that is reflected in the numbers above.

The India management can try and come up with some programme to identify and groom classical off-spinners in domestic cricket, but it's unlikely that they'll find a lot of takers.

Over the years, India has produced several high-quality classical off-spinners. From Ghulam Ahmed to Erapalli Prasanna. From Srinivas Venkataraghavan to Harbhajan Singh. R Ashwin, however, might just be the last of the kind.

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