In my view, Indian cricket’s most enduring legacy has never been pace or brute power. It has always been spin — shaped by fingers and wrists, guided by flight and drift, and sustained by intellect. Long before India learned to dominate through batting depth or manufacture fast bowlers, it learned how to win by making the ball turn, dip, and deceive. That inheritance still survives, though today it exists more in fragments than as a complete tradition.
This truth was evident as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, when spin bowling in India was not merely a tactic but a philosophy. The golden quartet — Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Bishan Singh Bedi, and S. Venkataraghavan — did not just bowl spin; they practised an art form. Each represented a distinct technical school. Prasanna’s classical off-spin relied on loop, drift, and late deviation. Chandra’s wrist-driven leg-breaks exploded off the pitch with natural variation. Bedi’s left-arm orthodox was built on immaculate control of flight, side-spin, and trajectory. Venkat, meanwhile, embodied discipline — subtle changes of pace, angle, and length applied with strategic precision.
What bound them was not mystery alone, but flight. They were unafraid to toss the ball up, to give it air, to allow it to hang just long enough for doubt to creep into the batsman’s mind. The contest was psychological before it was physical. Wickets were earned through persuasion — by luring the batsman forward, disrupting footwork, and forcing commitment before certainty.
At its technical core, spin bowling thrived on three essentials: revolutions, trajectory, and deception. High revolutions created dip and sharper turn; flight created hesitation; drift moved the ball sideways in the air, altering the line before pitching. Remove any one of these, and spin loses its bite.
In the decades that followed, only a few across the world preserved this classical grammar. Australia briefly had Shane Warne, who combined wrist-spin with leadership, theatre, and tactical intelligence. Too often today, Warne’s genius is reduced to highlight reels of turning balls, when in truth his mastery lay in manipulating pace, trajectory, and angles from the crease. Sri Lanka, however, produced a once-in-a-generation phenomenon in Muttiah Muralitharan. His revolutions, drift, doosra, and imagination expanded the vocabulary of spin bowling in the most batting-friendly era the game has known. He proved that even on flat pitches, spin could dominate if the ball was made to talk in the air.
India’s own lineage runs deeper still. From Vinoo Mankad — who could turn the ball both ways, vary pace instinctively, and think several overs ahead — to Ravichandran Ashwin, Indian spinners traditionally carried full arsenals. Side-spin, top-spin, drift, the arm ball, the floater, the straighter one, the doosra, the googly, even the occasional chinaman — these were not tricks, but tools. Each delivery existed to plant uncertainty.
Today, much of that richness has been flattened.
Modern spin bowling, especially in limited-overs cricket, has become increasingly one-dimensional. Flat trajectories, reduced revolutions, minimal air time. Spinners are coached to “fire it in” rather than float it up, to survive rather than seduce, to contain rather than challenge. Control has replaced curiosity. Economy has replaced intent. The result is predictability — and predictability is fatal for spin bowling.
This regression is often blamed on bigger bats and shorter boundaries. That explanation is convenient, but incomplete. Power-hitting thrives on certainty. When the ball does not turn, does not dip, and does not linger in the air, it reaches the bat quicker and truer. Timing becomes simpler. Slogging becomes percentage cricket. Remove flight, and you remove hesitation — and hesitation is where spin lives.
Yet, even in this era, India still carries reminders of what spin can be when properly understood.
Ravindra Jadeja, often labelled merely a containing bowler, succeeds through relentless accuracy, subtle changes of pace, and intelligent use of angles from the crease. He may not always loop the ball extravagantly, but his mastery lies in forcing batsmen to play where he wants them to. Control, after all, is another form of deception.
Kuldeep Yadav represents something rarer — the wrist-spinner still willing to give the ball air. At his best, Kuldeep revives an almost forgotten sight: a delivery that dips late, drifts subtly, turns sharply, and hangs just long enough for the batsman to misjudge length or line. His struggles, too, reveal a modern truth — wrist-spinners are no longer afforded the patience once given to artists. Confidence, for such bowlers, is inseparable from freedom.
Ashwin remains the intellectual bridge between eras. He continues to experiment with trajectory, pace, angles, release points, and psychology. He does not merely bowl overs; he solves problems. He treats each batsman as a puzzle, each spell as a narrative. In doing so, he reminds us that spin bowling was never meant to be defensive. It was meant to be proactive, strategic, and disruptive.
New Zealand’s recent spin bowling against India reinforced this forgotten lesson. When the ball turned and lingered in the air, slogging ceased to be a solution. Batsmen were forced to rethink footwork, delay shot selection, and adjust timing. That momentary pause — that split-second of doubt — is the natural habitat of spin.
India’s spin legacy has not disappeared. But it has been simplified. And simplification is the enemy of mastery.
If the next generation rediscovers flight, drift, variation, and deception — if spin is once again taught as a thinking craft rather than a holding role — it will reclaim its rightful place. Not as a safety net, but as a weapon.
Because when the ball truly turns and talks, the game has no choice but to listen. (The author is former Hyderabad Ranji player and coach)
