A pink-ball oddball: Spinners redundant in this genre of the game?

A pink-ball oddball: Spinners redundant in this genre of the game?




The first pink-ball Test in India could be (mis) construed as a vindication of the spinners’ redundancy in this genre of the game. For the first time ever in the history of Indian cricket, their spinners went wicketless. It also had to do with the fact that they barely bowled: seven overs across both innings. Among the 29 wickets to have fallen in the match, only one went to the spinner (Taijul Islam dismissing Ajinkya Rahane on Day 2), reiterating the perception that pink-ball cricket is overwhelmingly skewed in favour of the faster men. While it’s true that seamers get better purchase, the spinners, especially those using their fingers, aren’t a peripheral force. Ask Nathan Lyon.

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Superb Lyon

In fact, the Australian off-spinner, who will be in action against Pakistan in the day-night Test beginning in Adelaide on Friday, average better with the pink ball than the red cherry. In five Tests, he has nabbed 17 wickets at 28, and including Sheffield games, he has bargained 29 scalps in nine games, at 27.55. It has not been a case of him slicing through a softened-up lower order after the pacemen had slit the top and middle orders, as is often assumed. Rather a bulk of those wickets have been specialists batsmen (13 off the 17, though it’s not a coincidence that ten of them were lefties). It includes some of the better players of spin, such as Alastair Cook (twice in the same Test in 2017-18), Dimuth Karunaratne, Babar Azam, Younis Khan, Temba Bavuma and Jean-Paul Duminy. And, on most instances, he has bowled as many overs as the seamers, superbly blending the strike-stock bowling duties. He ties up one end and picks wickets as well — under natural lights as well as floodlights.

Seam advantage

Theoretically, the pink ball is designed to make life difficult for the finger spinners, a reason wrist-spinner Kuldeep Yadav’s name was doing the rounds for the Kolkata Test. The ball is heavier, tends to get softer quite rapidly, making it difficult to grip. Naturally, it becomes difficult to purchase over-spin, a finger-spinner’s chief weapon in Australia. Consequently, less bounce too. But Lyon spots a blessing in disguise. “It’s hard to detect the seam under the lights. So it works for me, and I could experiment more with the seam positions,” he had said after the Ashes Test against England two seasons ago.

Subtle adjustments

Though he swears by the usual sporting truism of practice-for-perfection, he has incorporated subtle tweaks into his methods. For instance, he tends to flight the pink-ball more, gets more inward drift (and it has helped that most of the day-night games are played in Adelaide where the cross-wind is as permanent a feature as the Cathedral and the River Torrens), is slower through the air and imparts more revs on the ball. He gets more shoulder into the action, and hence he manages more turn than with the red Kookaburra. That he has been massively successful with the pink-ball is a testimony to his adaptability, as much as the utter mastery of his craft.

Neither a friend nor an enemy

The pink ball isn’t a spinner’s best friend. Neither is it a sworn enemy. Those shrewd enough have found means to bargain wickets. In their first day-night Test, Sri Lanka’s finger spinners, Rangana Herath and Dilruwan Perera, bowled beautifully — picking six wickets among them — to disarray Pakistan in Abu Dhabi and fashion a famous win. Discarded Australian left-arm spinner Steve O’Keefe has evolved into the most feared pink-ball destroyer in the domestic circuit (18 wickets at 18.22). And for all their deep pockets of fast-bowling wickets, Pakistan’s most successful pink-ball bowler has been leg-spinner Yasir Shah (17 wickets and two five-fors, though bleeding 37 runs for each). Shah, after his first experience of the pink ball, had said that he could grip the ball better and purchase more bounce. So fundamentally, it’s more about the quality of a bowler than the type of bowler he is. So amidst a raft of thrilling pacemen from either side, Lyon and Shah wouldn’t be merely making up the numbers.