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Spinner with killer touch
The Electronic Telegraph Friday 1 September 1995 Cricket
Kumble spinner with killer touch
Simon Hughes on the Houdini act working its magic for Northants
LEG spinners are usually short, stocky and insolent. Mushtaq
Ahmed makes a surprising amount of noise for his size, Shane
Warne looks and struts like a well-fed beach-bum, Abdul Qadir is
small and barbed with a howling appeal like a wrestler who has
stepped on a pin.
At first appearances, Anil Kumble - pronounced Koom-blay -
does not fit the mould. He has a tall, lithe physique and, when
wearing his metal-rimmed spectacles, looks like a computer sales-
men. He is softly spoken, courteous and modest. But put him in
whites, give him contact lenses and a ball and offer him some
English batsmen, and he becomes an ogre, fizzing down leggies,
top-spinners and quick in- dippers, following them up with a
yell of anguish when a bat-pad catch falls just out of reach.
Keith Fletcher obviously only spotted one side to his charac-
ter when, after watching him bowl in Johannesburg, he made
the now famous comment: "I didn`t see him turn a single ball
from leg to off. I don`t believe we`ll have much problem with
him."
The first part of his observation was on the spot -even now he
rolls the ball out of his hand rather than really tweaking it -
but the second was a double wide. He subsequently bothered and
bewil- dered all England`s batsmen in 1993 in India and, claiming
his wicket four times out of six, wrecked Robin Smith`s confi-
dence so badly it took him a year to recover.
It is a year ago this week that Northamptonshire, rejected by
Warne, finally tracked down Kumble at a training camp in Madras
and offered him terms over the phone. He accepted immediate-
ly. Mike Procter and Mohammed Azharuddin had recommended him to
Allan Lamb, and what excellent judges they have proved to be.
He has not missed a championship match, averaged six wickets a
game, and master- minded several Houdini acts in the course of
taking 48 in the last five.
This is the kind of havoc another unorthodox leg spinner,
Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Kumble`s mentor, used to wreak. They are
both from Bangalore and first met when the teenage Kumble was a
medium pace in-swing bowler.
"Looks to me like he bowls a lot of flippers"
He always had the ability to roll out a leg-cutter and over a
period of several years gradually increased the fingerwork and
re- duced the pace. "Whenever I`m home I discuss strategy, line,
different grips with Chandra," Kumble said, examining a set of
digits surpris- ingly free of spinners` callouses.
"Not very surprising that," Richie Benaud said, "he`s not a
big turner of the ball. Looks to me like he bowls a lot of
flippers." Kumble denies this, claiming he has not yet got the
confidence to bowl them in a match, but he certainly pins a lot
of batsmen lbw with a wicked, skidding delivery.
The essence of his bowling is a subtle change of pace allied to
relentless accuracy. His slower ball spins more, the quicker one
is so fast that Kevin Curran, his regular slip fielder, often
re- quests a secret warning so he can stand two yards further
back. For- tunately, the slip is less important to Kumble than
the silly point, which is constantly in the game as batsmen
lunge forward, bat behind pad. "People can`t seem to judge
his pace at all," Curran said, "and he`s amazingly aggressive
for a spinner."
His record speaks for itself. He ribs Lamb constantly for be-
ing his first Test victim - snared at silly point in the 1990
series -and is now one short of a hundred Test victims in only 20
appearances at a strike rate practically identical to Warne`s.
Kumble is still only 24, but he and Mushtaq, with 170-odd
first-class wickets between them this season, have discovered
that Robin Smith is not the only English batsman who struggles
against leg spin.
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