In the recently concluded Test at Visakhapatnam, R Ashwin became the joint fastest bowler to 350 Test wickets, and Ravindra Jadeja became the fastest left-arm bowler to 200. Yet despite these superlative records, we frequently hear them dismissed or excluded when we discuss modern greats because ‘they’re only effective in Asia’.
For our purposes, let’s leave aside why strong performances in one’s home conditions can apparently be dismissed, and the extent to and reasons for which this is disproportionately applied to players from a rival nation or a nation different to one’s own (cf the deeply tiresome criticism of James Anderson as only effective in swinging conditions by some Australian and Indian fans).
For it to be a valid analysis, the following three conditions must be satisfied:
Condition 1 - Spinners must be disproportionately more successful in Asia than outside Asia.
Condition 2 - Ashwin and Jadeja must perform little better than an average spinner in Asia.
Condition 3 - Ashwin and Jadeja must perform worse than the average spinner outside Asia.
Were Conditions 1 and 2 to be met, one would have to conclude that Ashwin and Jadeja’s outstanding records are simply emergent properties of them bowling a lot in helpful conditions - to be blunt, that they are nothing special.
For Condition 3 to be satisfied, it’s not enough to simply compare Ashwin and Jadeja’s Asia and non-Asia figures - ‘Spinner Better When Ball Spins’ is hardly worth writing an article about. One must go further, and look at how all spinners fare in non-Asian conditions so that we have a meaningful benchmark for those figures, and can accurately determine whether Ashwin and Jadeja conform to the stereotype of players who can’t cope when they don’t have the comfort blanket of helpful home conditions - i.e. a Home Track Bully.
1. Spinners must be disproportionately more successful in Asia than outside Asia.
So yes, the figures bear out conventional wisdom that spinners perform far better in Asia. So far, so predictable. But now we’ve got the benchmarks, let’s look at Ashwin and Jadeja’s records compared to them.
2. Ashwin and Jadeja must perform little better than an average spinner in Asia.
Ashwin and Jadeja don’t just outperform the average - they obliterate it. To be close to 1/3 better than the mean over a significant number of Tests, taking wickets faster at a lower economy rate (significantly so in Jadeja’s case), is extraordinary. For context, that’s not far off the 35% margin by which Don Bradman’s batting average exceeds that of Steve Smith.
To return to Anderson, Ashwin and Jadeja are to bowling in Asia what the most prolific seamer in Test history is to bowling in England - supremely skilful, relentlessly accurate, and increasingly lethal masters of maximising every inch of additional movement afforded them. Condition 2 is a complete non-starter.
As to whether Ashwin and Jadeja are actually poor outside Asia, rather than less effective compared to how lethal they are in Asia, let’s go back to Condition 3.
Condition 3 - Ashwin and Jadeja must perform worse than the average spinner outside Asia.
Ashwin and Jadeja outside of Asia have the records of decent holding bowlers - again, Jadeja is particularly hard to score off - and useful foils to a good pace attack (lucky then that India currently have the best they’ve ever produced). They are reliable and dependable, but undeniably not very penetrative.
Ashwin in particular struggled in the first four years of his career to even perform a role as a containing bowler on the road, not helped by a then raw pace attack, India veering wildly from home mega-season to never-ending tours (from August 2012 to December 2014, India played 12 straight home Tests followed by 12 straight away Tests), and an overuse of his variations that smacked of impatience.
But from 2015 onwards, Ashwin’s record outside is very decent indeed:
While Ashwin has been particularly good in recent years against a work-in-progress West Indies, since 2015 he averages 30.71 in South Africa, 32.00 in England and 36.00 in Australia, and his economy rate in all 3 countries is lower than his career figure of 2.84.
As for Jadeja, at the risk of slipping into reverse #RootMaths, his non-Asian record is skewed by one spectacularly unpenetrative tour of New Zealand in 2014 (Brendon McCullum’s triple hundred and all that). He like Ashwin has been a solid performer outside Asia in the last four years.
Throw in the fact that Jadeja averages 35.75 with the bat outside Asia since 2015 with 3 fifties in 10 innings, batting almost exclusively at no.8, and you begin to understand why increasingly he is preferred to Ashwin when India can only accommodate one spinner in the XI.
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We are left not only with the myth of Ashwin and Jadeja as home-track bullies exploded, but with the startling conclusion that the joint-fastest to 350 Test wickets and the fastest left-armer to 200 Test wickets may actually be underrated. How long this remains the case is an open question - after all, it took Nathan Lyon 6 years…