Jumbo’s Last Flight

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‘It is the end of an era’. How many times have you read or heard this statement when a legendary player retires from any sport? I ask this question because India’s former test skipper announced his retirement on the last day of the third test match in Delhi between India and Australia in October 2008.

Sachin Tendulkar says Kumble is the best bowler India has had; Ian Chappell says it will be hard for India to produce another Kumble and some of the Pakistani players praised the commitment, grit and determination ‘Jumbo’ has shown for the past 19 years. The way he came back to the field after fracturing his jaw against West Indies at Antigua in 2002 is a perfect example of that.

However, I would like to say that no doubt whatever is written above is true but Kumble was never a ‘very’ talented player. One of the reasons is that he was not a big turner of the ball and the other being he got a big chunk of his 600 plus wickets from the lower order. If you carefully look at the way he takes wickets, he often used to beat the batsmen by pace by pitching the ball in line with the stumps and had the batsmen LBW or bowled in case of not very good batsmen. He hardly got batsmen beaten by turn or flight (which was never there). The fact that he was almost always in the team (except for the two year period around 1990-1992), was true because we never had any other spinner who could bowl really well or could even take wickets on a regular basis. So, at least we had some one who could clear the tail away sooner or later. We had Venkatapathy Raju, Ashish Kapoor, Sairaj Bahutule, Sarandeep Singh and a few other spinners as well who could never establish themselves in the team for more than a few months. And since Indian pitches have been favouring spinners since time immemorial, we had to keep at least one spinner who was taking wickets by beating batsmen by pace or by turn. Then came Harbhajan Singh in 1998 but even he did not stay for long. But, it was in 2001 when he made his comeback against Australia and took 32 wickets (including a hat-trick) in a three test series and threatened Kumble’s place as an established spinner in the team. Since then they both have been in and out of the playing eleven (but almost always in the team of 16) because now we had a bowler who could turn, flight and spin the ball. Of course ‘bhajji’ has not been consistently consistent but he certainly has been the best of the lot we have had for the past 10-15 years.
It was only when Rahul Dravid stepped down as the skipper almost a year ago, Mahi was too young to lead a test team and Sachin said it was time for someone younger than him to take over as the captain, that the selection committee made Kumble as the makeshift captain of the test team. Unfortunately, after that his performance got worse which probably made him think of retirement. And as he discovered during the Test series against Australia that he was not getting wickets, he decided to hang up his boots.

It might be the end of an era but it certainly is the beginning of another for the other spinners to take over and take the team to a higher level.