‘I feel it’s at a standstill…’ IPL record wicket-taker on role of spinners in IPL

“I feel it’s at a standstill. And there is not much of an improvement from the spinner’s point of view. The spinners who have just come in there and bowled those good lengths and just didn’t try to do too many extra things, they have been doing well,” Chawla, who is the fourth highest wicket-taker with his tally of 192 wickets in IPL history, told ESPNCricinfo.

This IPL is seeing the likes of Ravichandran Ashwin having retired from international cricket apart from IPL. With scores in excess of 200 runs being scored for more than 30 times this IPL so far, this IPL has also seen team captains opting for pacers for most of the overs in the allotted 20 overs with some spinners not even getting her full quota of overs. In the leading wicket-takers list this season, the top seven bowlers are pacers with Bhuvneshwar Kumar leading the list with a tally of 17 wickets. While spinners like Ravi Bishnoi and Rashid Khan are placed at the eighth spot and ninth spot with 11 and ten wickets respectively, there have been instances when a spinner like Bishnoi has been dropped by his team Rajasthan Royals. 2011 IPL winner and former Indian batsman Abhinav Mukund believes spinner needs to evolve and got to figure a way to bowl better in the format. “I think spinners definitely need to evolve. It’s that time where we have come to a point where Piyush is not playing, Ashwin is not playing anymore. You have got a lot of these spinners, who are underutilised in multiple teams. Teams willing to go to pace because they have multiple get out of jail cards, two bouncers in an over. So you have to start evolving. You have got to figure out a way to bowl better. I don’t think that spinners have sort of breached that mental break up of having the mindset to start varying our speeds a lot more. We cannot bowl these hit me balls. We need to finish overs well. We need to know how to give a single,” Mukund said on ESPNCricinfo.

Chawla believes that spinners need to go back to the basics in the T20 format and need to win the trust of the captain as well the think tank of the teams. When asked about captains not trusting the spinners in the format for crucial overs, Chawla was affirmative of the fact. “Well it is. Because a lot of the captains you see, who do not trust their spinners mindset. That they come in the middle overs and get those wickets. And if they bowl a good over, can they bowl an over under 8 or 9 runs. So if that’s happening that’s the reason you have not seen many spinners bowling that very number of overs. This is not actually working well for the spinners. If the spinners in few of the teams, whose tradition is always there, somebody like KKR no matter where they are playing, they play with three spinners. And the quality of spin is there. Although Varun Chakravarthy was expensive to start with, after the break when he came back, he went back to his basics. So now as a spinner, you need to win the trust of your captain and thinking tank. So for that, they need to come and bowl in those good areas and bowl that kind of spell where it really show and win that confidence of your captain,” added Chawla.