worth reading - one of the modern greats of the game, R Ashwin, announced his retirement in the middle of the series against Australia. I look up to him since we are the same ethnicity (Tamil) a group which has always been disadvantaged in Indian cricket due to the language barrier, and I related a lot to his personality. He was an incredibly outspoken, intellectual, creative and controversial cricketer, who was happy to discuss his thought process on interviews or on his YouTube channel. some considered him arrogant, but it’s not arrogance if you can back it up…
“The great problem-solver who played cricket for cricket’s sake” - here’s some tributes from around the web
He wanted to bat, he wanted to bowl fast, he wanted to captain, he wanted to organise matches. […] Most of us Indians don’t experiment lest we end up losing what we have earned through blood, sweat and tears, and luck, in a country as fiercely competitive as India. But Ashwin did everything there was to be done in the department of offspin bowling.
This writer once asked him if he didn’t fear losing the quality offbreak. “Then what will you do?” He said if he did lose it, it would mean it wasn’t his to keep. He never let that fear, that conservative mindset, come in the way of his pursuit for excellence.
For all the misplaced criticism he attracted, Ashwin also gained a growing band of admirers who tried to keep up with what he was doing to his craft. Wittingly and unwittingly, he went on to spend his entire career in the eye of a cyclone of narrative and counter-narrative. It was partly because he came along when [he did] … But it was also because Ashwin was a singularly active challenger of conventional wisdom, not just on the field - as no doubt many others also were - but off it too.
There is thinking different, and then there is being different. Ashwin was smart enough to do the first one, and courageous enough to do the second. … It was like he got bored of just being great at off-spin. [Jarrod Kimber]
I’ll say again that I never expected Ashwin to become what he is today. He wasn’t genetically gifted like an Usain Bolt or a Michael Phelps. He was just a middle-class boy who had the smarts to become a doctor or an accountant - or the engineer he eventually became. He had no business becoming an elite athlete and one of the best at that. It meant taking the road less travelled, using every inch of an advantage he could get, and trying to innovate and adapt all the time. I said this once on commentary: R Ashwin is like your latest smartphone; his software is always up to date. [Abhinav Mukund, former club teammate]
and a stat: Ashwin was the fastest Indian to reach 50 Test wickets, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, and 500, finally retiring with 537. He is the second fastest in the history of the sport to reach 500 (coincidentally behind another Tamil), and the second most prolific Indian bowler of all time (behind another South Indian).
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