David Frith has a delightful description of the unorthodox Australian spinner Jack Iverson’s bowling action: “He flicked the ball as would a man disposing of a burnt-out cigarette.” Iverson held the ball between a bent middle finger and thumb and made it turn from the off. He had worked on it with a table tennis ball.
In Chennai decades later, Ravichandran Ashwin learnt to bowl a similar delivery with a tennis ball and made it go the other way. He called it the sodakku ball “because of the click sound the thumb and the middle finger make,” he writes in a delightful memoir, I Have the Streets. Ashwin notices that some Sri Lankans including orthodox left-armer Rangana Herath bowl that delivery. Later it is christened the carrom ball.
It is unusual for an international bowler to continue experimenting with deliveries well into his career — but Ashwin continues to do so. One possible reason might be, as he says with great self-awareness in another context, “When it comes to cricket, I am basically made of questions.”
It all began on the streets of Chennai, and a team named RUCA (Ramakrishnapuram Underarm Cricket Association). It says something of the kind of person Ashwin is that he has short bio data of his team-mates in RUCA. It includes a player who calls himself Peter Siddle, but is known as Peter Schedule because “we have to clear our schedules whenever he bowls.” He once sent down a 28-ball over.
No one has captured Chennai cricket from the inside like Ashwin has (with help from cricket writer Sidharth Monga). The passion, the madness, the humour, friendships, self-belief, that combination of insularity and world-weariness that is unique.
I lived in Chennai in the 1980s, reporting and playing, and I recognise this charming mixture. Nicknames came easily. There was a bowler named ‘Tyte’ because he ran in like the fast bowler Frank Tyson but bowled like the spinner Gupte. If sodakku is common usage now, then it was ‘ arakozhi’, to describe a stroke neither forward nor back and a literal translation of half-cock which describes it.
“Whenever I lose something in life,” writes Ashwin, “when I see no other light, I turn to this cricket in our street with some of my best friends. Everything changes, but not the joy I experience when I play here.”
There’s more in the book, of course. The medical issues, the falling in love, the relationship with fellow players and the many arguments that are natural companions of a self-assured man. Told after being given his first IPL contract that he would now be rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dhoni, Muttiah Muralitharan and Matthew Hayden, Ashwin thinks to himself, “I am not here to rub shoulders. I am here to show that I belong here.”
On the other hand, he quickly discovers, “One place I don’t belong is at the IPL after-match parties.” A lovely blend of the confident and the diffident. Another mixture reflecting Chennai cricket.
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