Ind vs Ban – 1st Test – R Ashwin knows Chepauk inside out and turns Bangladesh around

He remembers the bus he took to the stadium as a child. “12G Subscribe [you have to catch bus No. 12G]he said in an episode for Star Sports Tamil in 2023. “It goes directly to Anna Sala (road). If an uncle is nice enough to give you a ride, you can get to the ground in about 10 minutes. If not, Complete AA Kit Bag – a Thookittu Longu-Longunu Nadanthu Varanum (you have to trudge the whole way with your gym bag).”

He recalls being coached not only by those he trained with but also by people who happened to see him playing on the street. “Everyone likes to give advice, especially when it comes to cricket. One time I tried to hit a ball and it took an inside edge and deviated – no runs. Leg side, no runs. An uncle who had to go to hospital – there’s a hospital near my house – just came up to me and said, ‘Pa, how many matches have you seen? You play with a straight bat and the ball flies beautifully along the ground. Straight ahead-aa vachu aadu. Keep the club face straight.'”

In that match against England, his home crowd gave him a feeling that he knows very well, having seen millions of masala films, but perhaps for the first time, he experienced it from the other side. In those five days, he was Rajinikanth in Bashha or Shah Rukh Khan in Don or Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. And that doesn’t happen too often, if only because Test cricket in India doesn’t follow a set schedule like it does abroad. Melbourne knows there will be a Test on Boxing Day. Lord’s knows it will be the biggest event of the summer. Ashwin and his beloved Chepauk don’t have that luxury. At 38, even he isn’t sure if he’s played his last Test here.

“I don’t know,” he said in Sunday’s press conference. “What is a Chepauk swan song? Every time you go to the park, it’s a swan song. You’re talking about a Test match, yes. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? Like I said, every day, every Test match that I play is a big deal. Not just for me, you can ask any cricketer, getting through a Test match or a Test series is an uphill battle. And you never really know what’s coming next when it comes to Test matches. Because you put in that effort, everything, and then you have to be lucky enough to put in those performances, work hard as well, and at the same time, manage your ups and downs. Those are all big challenges for any Test cricketer. So I didn’t think that far ahead, but if that was my swan song, what a swan song!”

“The beauty of a red soil [pitch] is, if you turn it up, there is a value [even if there is no turn]. Because there’s a bounce. You get hit, but there’s a bounce. When you play on some black clay courts elsewhere in the country, not naming them, you have to do a lot of hard work. You give it a lot of gas and you see nothing come out of it. And sometimes it’s better not to give it too much gas in certain spots. So to even understand all of these things, to start to understand them and talk about them, it’s a lot of learning for me. And that’s happened over the years. Like I said, this one has a solid bounce. And I’d rather play on a court like this and get hit than play on any other court.”

Knowing what the pitch will do is only part of the challenge. The batsman presents the others and Ashwin has to find a way to get through them. On the third evening he had seen evidence of how much bite he would have if he dropped his pace significantly. Mominul Haque attempted a sweep and both he and wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant were effortlessly beaten by a flamboyant bounce. The ball only reached 80.4 kmph.

The bowler in him knew that he had to fly slowly through the air to find a footing. The batter in him then added this information. “Tamim [Iqbal] is standing next to you,” Ashwin told the host. “He will tell you that if you slow down on these surfaces, you can go on the defensive a lot more often.”

Ashwin combined this knowledge to set his traps. First, he would feed Bangladesh faster, flatter balls to keep them stuck on the crease. Then he would throw a ball up and if all went to plan, the batsman set for a certain pace and length would be taken out of the game.

“I’ve earned the right to bowl slower now and then. Because on certain pitches where you get help from the surface, you can afford to throw the ball a little bit further, but this is a surface where you have to change your pace and length and then pull the slower ball. So very often the ball that responded off the surface was really slow.”

Three of his six wickets came from throws in the early 80s.

Two others spoke about how good he is at picking apart a batsman’s defence. He bowled around the wicket for almost the entire Test match because there were a lot of left-handers and he bowled on their inside edge. He got them forward with his length and left them standing with his overspin because the ball was looking to drop towards them and then bounce up off the pitch.

Shakib was caught at short leg in this sequence.

The best of the lot was Mominul, bowling on the outside edge. Ashwin somehow managed to turn enough to hit the bat, but not so much that it missed the stumps. By going a little further off the line, he was able to create the angle to the batsman and get him to play down the wrong line, and then he did something with the seam to limit the help he got from the track.

Normally an offbreak bowler would let the seam show to first slip. This one showed much more squarely. It also turned as the ball began its descent into the pitch. An upright seam is usually the driving force behind the spin and bounce that a finger spinner gets. Here Ashwin deliberately limited both so that what was happening had a chance – hitting the batsman but not the stumps. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the spin isn’t enough and the angle puts the ball right in the middle of the bat. But that was Chepauk and Ashwin knows he’s always behind him. “There’s a certain energy that just draws me to that pitch.”